Nuance Communications, Inc.
System and method for contextual reasoning

Abstract:

In an embodiment, a method includes determining, based on a received query and contextual information, candidate reasoners to respond to a received query to select a candidate reasoner. A reasoner or candidate reasoner is a module that translates information from a sensor, user settings, or other source, into additional or revised fields for a query. The method further includes generating, at each candidate reasoner determined, additional or revised query fields based on the contextual information and a rule of a rule database. The method further includes merging the additional query fields for each candidate reasoner based on a confidence score or other metric of each corresponding candidate reasoner. The confidence score can be based on applicability of the contextual information to the received query. The method further includes providing an enhanced query having the additional or revised query fields. Such a method enhances natural language understanding by supplementing queries with contextual information.