Patent ID: 7451089

Claim:
A method of responding to user utterances in a spoken dialog service, the method comprising: receiving a user utterance; identifying a question and an answer selected from a question and answer table based on a similarity computation that calculates a similarity between the user utterance and at least one question in the question and answer table and a set of words in the user utterance that are not found in a set of unique words in the question and answer table; and presenting an answer to the user utterance from the identified question and answer, wherein the identified question and answer is output to a dialog management module and wherein the similarity computation further comprises: Sim ⁡ ( Q , FAQ j ) = ∑ i ⁢ q i · faq ji ∑ i ⁢ ( q i ) 2 + c ⁡ ( 0.5 ) 2 · ∑ i ⁢ ( faq ji ) 2 wherein the term faq ji represents the questions in the question and answer table and the term q i represents the user utterance and c is the set of words.