Rapid development of virtual personal assistant applications

摘要

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.

主权项

1. A method for creating a virtual personal assistant (“VPA”) computer application for a domain of interest, the method comprising, with a computing system:
determining the domain of interest; accessing a computerized ontology defining a structure for representing knowledge relating to a plurality of domains including the domain of interest, each domain referring to a category of information and/or activities in relation to which the VPA computer application may conduct a conversational natural language dialog with a computing device user, the ontology having linked thereto a plurality of re-usable VPA components, each of the re-usable VPA components being accessible by an executable VPA engine to, during operation of the VPA, determine a likely intended goal of the computing device user based on a determined meaning of explicit and implicit conversational natural language input of the computing device user, execute a task on behalf of the computing device user, and/or generate a likely appropriate system output in response to the conversational natural language input; determining a data relationship between the domain of interest and at least a portion of the ontology; and suggesting a re-usable VPA component to use to create the VPA computer application for the domain of interest based on the data relationship between the domain of interest and the ontology.