Patent ID: 8065151

Claim:
A method of providing a dialog interface for a website by processing each respective node in the website via a computing device, the method comprising, for a respective node: computing a summary based on a list of anchor texts selected at least based on term density associated with a percentage of salient words within a phrase relative to a total number of words in the phrase for content beneath the respective node, the list of anchor texts comprising less than all anchor texts for the respective node and a number of salient words within the phrase being less than all words in the phrase, a document description comprising anchor texts of all links pointing to the respective node and an alias representing a best single representative anchor text for the respective node, wherein computing the summary comprises using the following algorithm: Define Summarize_Node (N, L, T) S (N) ={ }; A (N) ={a ij }; Token (N) ={t m }; A (N) =Initialize_A (N,T); Token (N) =Initialize_Token(L); While (|S (N) |<L and |A (N) >0) (m,n)=arg max(w ij ), w ij >0 i,j S (N) =S (N) +S mn Remove a mn from A (N) t m =t m −1 For remaining items a ij in A (N) do: Remove a ij if t i <= or w ij =0 or S ij consists of same terms as S mn Endfor Endwhile where N is a node, L is a maximum number of information items, T is a term table, S is a summary field, the Token (N) is a set of numbers associated with the dialog and A (N) is a parameter associated with describing hyperlinks belonging to the respective node; identifying hyperlinks associated with the respective node and a weight associated with each hyperlink, wherein the weight relates to a percent of salient words in each anchor text of the respective node relative to the total words in anchor texts of all links pointing to the respective node; and using the identified hyperlinks, weights, the computed summary, document description and alias for each website node, generating prompts to a user via a dialog manager associated with a dialog interface to the website to generate prompts to a user, wherein nodes in the website are matched with user requests, wherein the dialog manager is trained using a structured representation of the website and a structured task knowledge base, wherein the structured task knowledge base is converted from heterogeneous web data on the website.