Patent ID: 7584099

Claim:
A method for interpreting a verbal input in a multimodal dialog system, the multimodal system being an apparatus that comprises input and output devices and a processing system, the method comprising: receiving the verbal input at an input device of the multi modal dialog system, generating a word sequence from the verbal input by a verbal recognition component of the processing system using a recognition grammar, the word sequence comprising at least one word that is semantically tagged; assigning by a value assigner component of the processing system a confidence value to each of the at least one word generated by the verbal recognition component, based on the word's semantic importance; generating by a score generator of the processing system a semantic unit confidence score for the word sequence, the generation of the semantic unit confidence score being based on the confidence value of each of the at least one word and at least one semantic confidence operator; and generating an output by a human interface output device based on the semantic unit confidence score.