Patent ID: 7533089

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for generating a recommended query for a conversation system in response to an original query, wherein at least a portion of the original query is not understandable to a query interpretation process, the method comprising the steps of: computing query recommendation results, in response to the original query, using a natural language generation-based recommendation process, wherein the natural language generation-based recommendation result computing step comprises the steps of: selecting content for use in generating the recommended query, wherein the content selection step comprises the steps of: extracting one or more features from at least one of the original query and interpretation results generated by the query interpretation process, wherein the one or more extracted features characterize a current interpretation problem associated with the original query; based on the one or more extracted features that characterize the current interpretation problem exhibited by the interpretation results generated by the query interpretation process, determining and applying one or more rules, indexed by the current interpretation problem, for use in revising at least a portion of the original query to generate semantic content for use in generating the recommended query; and based on the semantic content, generating a grammatically-appropriate sentence which forms the recommended query, wherein the grammatically-appropriate sentence generating step further comprises retrieving one or more of words, phrases and sentence segments from at least one of the original query and a query corpus to convey the semantic content for the recommended query; computing query recommendation results, in response to the original query, using a retrieval-based recommendation process, wherein the retrieval-based recommendation result computing step comprises the step of computing one or more similarity scores based on the original query and one or more example queries from a query corpus; generating a recommended query by proportionately merging at least a portion of the natural language generation-based query recommendation results and at least a portion of the retrieval-based query recommendation results; and sending the recommended query back to a sender of the original query such that a subsequent query can be sent based on the recommended query.