Ontology-Based Virtual Assistant Development Platform
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Solution Overview
Problem
Developing virtual personal assistant (VPA) applications is a complex and labor-intensive task due to the need for extensive knowledge about user interactions, cultural norms, and domain-specific information, which requires a sophisticated assortment of software components and knowledge representation.
Innovation Solution
A VPA development platform that utilizes a shareable ontology and re-usable components, populated with domain-specific data from web sources, to automate the selection and instantiation of components for specific domains, simplifying the development and maintenance of VPA applications.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If traditional VPA development methods are used with extensive knowledge representation and sophisticated software components, then the VPA can correctly interpret user input and execute tasks, but the development process becomes arduous and labor-intensive
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the complex VPA development process into distinct modules including ontology population agents, domain-specific knowledge bases, and reusable dialogue management components. This modular architecture allows each component to be developed and maintained independently, reducing overall system complexity while preserving functionality.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates universal dialogue management components and reusable software modules that can be applied across multiple VPA applications and domains. These universal components eliminate the need to build complex interpretation systems from scratch for each new VPA, reducing development effort while maintaining reliable user input interpretation.
2Adaptability or versatility
If traditional VPA development methods are used with extensive domain knowledge representation, then the VPA can reason over large amounts of knowledge, but the development task becomes arduous
Solution Approach 1:
The patent employs ontology population agents that automatically populate domain-specific knowledge bases with structured information before the VPA development begins. This preliminary action of pre-organizing domain knowledge into standardized ontologies reduces the manual effort required during the actual VPA development process while maintaining comprehensive domain reasoning capabilities.
Solution Approach 2:
The system uses automated ontology population agents that self-service the knowledge base population task by extracting and structuring domain knowledge from available sources. This automation reduces manual development effort while ensuring the VPA has access to comprehensive domain knowledge for reasoning.
3Ease of operation
If comprehensive knowledge bases are used to enable cultural norms and human behavior understanding, then the VPA interaction quality improves, but the knowledge base size and complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent creates domain-specific knowledge bases that contain detailed information about local cultural norms and human behaviors relevant to particular application domains. Rather than maintaining one massive general knowledge base, the system uses targeted, domain-specific knowledge representations that provide high interaction quality for each specific use case while keeping individual knowledge base sizes manageable.
Data Source
AI summary
A platform for developing a virtual personal assistant (“VPA”) application includes an ontology that defines a computerized structure for representing knowledge relating to one or more domains. A domain may refer to a category of information and/or activities in relation to which the VPA application may engage in a conversational natural language dialog with a computing device user. Re-usable VPA components may be linked to or included in the ontology. An ontology populating agent may at least partially automate the process of populating the ontology with domain-specific information. The re-usable VPA components may be linked with the domain-specific information through the ontology. A VPA application created with the platform may include domain-adapted re-usable VPA components that may be called upon by an executable VPA engine to determine a likely intended meaning of conversational natural language input of the user and/or initiate an appropriate system response to the input.