Patent ID: 7197460

Claim:
A spoken language understanding module comprising: logic for performing spoken language understanding; and logic for handling frequently asked questions, the logic for handling frequently asked questions performing the steps of: classifying a user utterance; selecting a question and answer table from a plurality of question and answer tables for the classified user utterance; selecting a question from the selected question and answer table that is most similar to the user utterance using the following similarity computation: 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 transmitting the selected question and associated answer to a dialog management module.