Patent ID: 7516076
Filing Date: 2009-04-07
Classification: G10L,H04M

Abstract:
1. A task classification system that interacts with a user, comprising: a recognizer that recognizes symbols in the user's input communication; a natural language understanding unit that determines whether the user's input communication can be understood, wherein if the user's communication can be understood, the natural language understanding unit generates understanding data; a communicative goal generator that generates a plurality of communicative goals based on the symbols recognized by the recognizer and understanding data from the natural language understanding unit, the generated plurality of communicative goals being related to information needed to be obtained from the user and based on the user's input communication which is a communication which immediately precedes the generation of the plurality of communicative goals; a sentence plan generator that generates a plurality of sentence plans based on the plurality of communicative goals generated by the communicative goal generator, each sentence plan of the plurality of sentence plans being a viable and potentially usable prompt in response to the user's input; and a sentence plan ranker that, independent of the user, ranks the plurality of sentence plans generated by the sentence plan generator, wherein at least one of the ranked sentence plans is output to the user, and wherein the user's input communication and the output at least one ranked sentence plan comprise a single dialog turn in a spoken dialog including the user's input communication and the output at least one ranked sentence plan.