Microsoft Corporation
Utilizing rule specificity in conversational AI

Abstract:

Techniques are provided for building a dialog-state specific contextual language understanding system using subsumption logic. Information establishing conversational rules identifying the conversational dialog is received to present in respective dialog states. Each rule has a Boolean trigger expression of predicates for testing the conversational state together with logical connectives to identify when the rule is applicable. Subsumption logic is used to arrange the rules into a directed acyclic graph (DAG) where more specific rules are preferred to more general rules. During a conversation, the DAG is used to filter the triggered rules to only the most specific triggered rules from which a rule to run is selected. This structure makes it easier to build conversational systems because rules can be added or removed without having to change or reason over other rules. The rules also act as a constraint to help machine learned selection systems converge with less data.