Patent Document ID: 7603267
Application ID: 10427604

Base Claim:
1. An authoring component configured for generating components for use in mapping natural language inputs to slots and preterminals derived from a schema in a natural language understanding (NLU) system, the authoring component comprising: a model trainer implemented using a processor of a computer, wherein the model trainer obtains a schema indicative of a task to be completed, the schema including a plurality of slots and a plurality of preterminals configured to be filled with portions of a natural language input, the preterminals comprising at least one of a preamble and postamble associated with one or more of the slots, and wherein the model trainer is configured to train a rules based grammar, based on training data, for mapping terms from the natural language input to slots derived from the schema and to train a plurality of statistical models for mapping terms from the natural language input to the preterminals derived from the schema, wherein the model trainer is configured to train a statistical model corresponding to each of a plurality of different preterminals, wherein the model trainer receives the training data and enumerates segmentations of the training data to associate the slots and preterminals with the training data, wherein the model trainer is configured to train a statistical model for each preterminal derived from the schema using the text associated with each preterminal as training data for the statistical model for that preterminal.

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Claim 9:
9. The authoring component of claim 1 , wherein the slots derived from the schema are configured to be filled with terms from the natural language input that represent a task to be completed using the rules based grammar, and wherein the preterminals derived from the schema comprise at least one of preambles associated with the slots, postambles associated with the slots, and commands associated with the schema that are configured to be filled with terms from the natural language input using the plurality of statistical models, and wherein only the rules based grammar of the plurality of statistical models and rules based grammar is used to map terms from the natural language input to the slots, and wherein only the plurality of statistical models of the plurality of statistical models and rules based grammar is used to map terms from the natural language input to the preterminals.