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 developing a computerized virtual personal assistant (“VPA”) application for a domain of interest, the VPA application comprising an executable VPA engine and a re-usable VPA component accessible by the VPA engine to enable the VPA application to determine a likely intended goal of a computing device user based on conversational natural language input of the computing device user relating to the domain of interest, execute a task on behalf of the user, and/or generate a likely appropriate system response to the conversational natural language input, the method comprising, with a computing system:
analyzing content of an Internet web page that supports electronic interactions with computing device users relating to the domain of interest; determining a characteristic that the content has in common with a computerized ontology that defines a structure for representing knowledge relating to one or more domains, wherein each domain refers to a category of information and/or activities in relation to which the VPA application may engage in a conversational natural language dialog with the computing device user; establishing a data relationship between the content and the ontology based on the common characteristic; and adapting the re-usable VPA component to the domain of interest by applying at least a portion of the content to the re-usable VPA component based on the data relationship between the content and the ontology.