Patent Document ID: 9489625
Application ID: 13891864

Base Claim:
1. A method for creating a virtual personal assistant (“VPA”) computer application for a domain of interest, the method comprising, with a computing system: determining the domain of interest; accessing a computerized ontology defining a structure for representing knowledge relating to a plurality of domains including the domain of interest, each domain referring to a category of information and/or activities in relation to which the VPA computer application may conduct a conversational natural language dialog with a computing device user, the ontology having linked thereto a plurality of re-usable VPA components, each of the re-usable VPA components being accessible by an executable VPA engine to, during operation of the VPA, determine a likely intended goal of the computing device user based on a determined meaning of explicit and implicit conversational natural language input of the computing device user, execute a task on behalf of the computing device user, and/or generate a likely appropriate system output in response to the conversational natural language input; determining a data relationship between the domain of interest and at least a portion of the ontology; and suggesting a re-usable VPA component to use to create the VPA computer application for the domain of interest based on the data relationship between the domain of interest and the ontology.

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Claim 9:
9. The method of claim 1 , wherein the suggested re-usable VPA component comprises a natural language dialog component usable by the VPA computer application to generate the likely appropriate system output to the conversational natural language input, and the method comprises mapping data from an Internet web page that supports electronic transactions with computing device users relating to the domain of interest to the natural language dialog component using the ontology.