Oracle Corporation
TECHNIQUES FOR MAINTAINING RHETORICAL FLOW

Abstract:

Disclosed systems, devices, and methods improve dialogue management through the use of dialogue discourse trees (DDTs). To determine whether a candidate response (CR) is appropriate in the dialogue, the CR can be added to other utterances that have been previously provided in a dialogue between two parties and a dialogue discourse tree (DDT) can be generated from the result. The DDT includes nodes corresponding to elementary discourse units (EDUs) representing text fragments of the utterances and the CR. The DDT may include nodes that indicate rhetorical relationships between EDUs. In some embodiments, the DDT comprises a node representing at least one dialogue-specific rhetorical relationship between two utterances. The DDT for the CR can be provided to a machine-learning model that has been trained to identify whether the rhetorical flow is maintained between the utterances of the DDT. If so, the CR can be provided in response to the request.