Microsoft Corporation
Architecture for resolving ambiguous user utterance

Abstract:

A method of disambiguating user queries in a multi-turn dialogue including a set of user utterances. The method includes using a predefined language model to recognize an ambiguous entity in an unresolved user utterance from the multi-turn dialogue, and using the predefined language model to recognize entity constraints of the ambiguous entity. The method further includes, in a computer-accessible conversation history of the multi-turn dialogue, searching a set of previously-resolved entities for a candidate entity having entity properties with a highest confidence correspondence to the entity constraints of the ambiguous entity. The unresolved user utterance is rewritten as a rewritten utterance that replaces the ambiguous entity with the candidate entity. The rewritten utterance is output to one or more query answering machines.