Patent ID: 11954613
Assignee: INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 0:
1. A method for establishing a logical connection between an indirect utterance and a transaction performed by a conversational system interfacing with an Internet accessible web server comprising:
as part of a conversation between the conversational system and a user, determining that an utterance from a user input to the conversational system is an indirect utterance because the utterance does not match, using a first matching method, any transaction represented by a subgraph in a knowledge graph, wherein the knowledge graph is stored in a memory of the conversational system and wherein a set of transactions is to be performed at least in part by the web server and each transaction is represented by a respective subgraph in the knowledge graph;
in response to the determination that the utterance is the indirect utterance, and during the conversation, parsing the indirect utterance to a first logical form using a second matching method, wherein the second matching method comprises:
mapping the first logical form to a first subgraph in the knowledge graph;
after mapping the first logical form to the first subgraph, searching for a path in the knowledge graph between the first subgraph and a second subgraph representing a first transaction in the set of transactions while transforming the first logical form using node and edge labels along the path to generate an intermediate logical form; and
determining if a graph structure of the intermediate logical form matches a graph structure of a logical form of a second transaction in the set of transactions, wherein the mapping, searching and determining if the graph structure of the intermediate logical form matches the graph structure of the logical form of the second transaction are performed in response to the determination that the utterance is the indirect utterance; and

performing a system action which completes at least part of the second transaction by communicating with the web server for a web resource mapped to the graph structure of the logical form of the second transaction;
wherein the determining the utterance is the indirect utterance, parsing, mapping, searching and performing operations are performed in software executing in a hardware element in the conversational system without requiring further input from the user.