Patent ID: 11914627
Assignee: GOOGLE LLC
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 7:
8. A computing system comprising:
one or more computers; and
one or more storage units storing instructions that when executed by the one or more computers cause the computing system to perform operations comprising:
obtaining a natural language query from a user;
parsing the natural language query into structured operations to be performed on structured application programming interfaces (APIs) of a knowledge base, wherein parsing the natural language query includes:
detecting a parsing ambiguity based on identifying two or more ways to parse the natural language query into one or more structured operations, wherein the parsing ambiguity indicates that the parsing of the natural language query cannot be resolved without receiving, from the user, user input to disambiguate the natural language query;
responsive to detecting the parsing ambiguity, providing, through a user interface, to the user, one or more information items identifying the parsing ambiguity for display and providing a request for user input identifying a domain-specific term to be used in the parsing of the natural language query to disambiguate the natural language query; and
responsive to a user interaction with at least one of the one or more information items, wherein the user interaction includes, as the user input to disambiguate the natural language query, the user input identifying the domain-specific term to be used in the parsing of the natural language query, (i) adding the domain-specific term to a domain-specific lexicon and (ii) modifying the parsing to use the domain-specific lexicon including the domain-specific term added in accordance with the user interaction to generate one or more structured operations;

performing the one or more structured operations on the structured APIs of the knowledge base to determine one or more search results; and
providing the one or more search results responsive to the natural language query to the user,

wherein:
the knowledge base and the user interface are implemented on one or more computers and one or more storage devices storing instructions;
the knowledge base stores information associated with entities according to a data schema and includes the structured APIs for programs to query the knowledge base;
the domain-specific term is retained in the domain-specific lexicon; and
the domain-specific lexicon in which the domain-specific term is retained is used in parsing a subsequent natural language query.