Dear Ali,
Thanks for the post. The claim tree
is far below, along with some spec paragraphs that refer to “active
ontology”. It would seem superficially to just mean the ontology
(among a collection of ontologies) that is considered appropriate for the
current conversation Siri is having with her human.
Do you see something more significant than
that first view of the term? Something about it captured your interest;
can you share that concern?
Thanks,
-Rich
1. An automated assistant operating on a computing device, the
assistant comprising: an input device,
for receiving user input; a language
interpreter component, for interpreting the received user input to
derive a representation of user intent;
a dialog flow processor component,
for identifying at least one domain,
at least one task, and at least
one parameter for the task, based
at least in part on the derived
representation of user intent; a services
orchestration component, for calling at least one service for performing the identified task; an output
processor component, for rendering output based on data received
from the at least one called service,
and further based at least in part on a current
output mode; and an output device,
for outputting the rendered output.
2. The automated assistant of claim 1, further comprising: an active input elicitation component, for generating
at least one prompt to actively
elicit input from a user; wherein the output device outputs the generated at
least one prompt.
5. The automated assistant of claim 2, further comprising: an active ontology, comprising representations of concepts and relationships among concepts; wherein the active input elicitation component generates the
at least one prompt using at least a subset of the representations in the active
ontology.
There are other uses of the term “active
ontology” in the claims after claim 5, so they must have something
significant in mind.
In the specification:
[0196] Within the context of the present invention, an "active ontology" 1050 may also serve
as an execution environment, in which distinct processing elements are arranged
in an ontology-like manner (e.g., having distinct attributes and relations with
other processing elements). These processing elements carry out at least some
of the tasks of intelligent automated assistant 1002. Any number of active
ontologies 1050 can be provided.
In the last half of para 197:
For example, some nodes of an active ontology may correspond to domain
concepts such as restaurant and its property restaurant name. During live
execution, these active ontology nodes may be instantiated with the identity of
a particular restaurant entity and its name, and how its name corresponds to
words in a natural language input utterance. Thus, in this embodiment, the
active ontology is serving as both a modeling environment specifying the
concept that restaurants are entities with identities that have names, and for
storing dynamic bindings of those modeling nodes with data from entity
databases and parses of natural language. [0207] Enable the communication and
coordination among components and processing elements of an intelligent
automated assistant, such as, for example, one or more of the following (or
combinations thereof): [0208] Active input elicitation component(s) 1094 [0209]
Language interpreter component(s) 1070 [0210] Dialog flow processor
component(s) 1080 [0211] Services orchestration component(s) 1082 [0212]
Services component(s) 1084
[0419] Disambiguation 230 may use data from, for example, the structure
of active ontology 1050. In at least one embodiment, the connections between
nodes in an active ontology provide evidential support for disambiguating among
candidate semantic parse results 222. For example, in one embodiment, if three
active ontology nodes are semantically matched and are all connected in active
ontology 1050, this indicates higher evidential strength of the semantic parse
than if these matching nodes were not connected or connected by longer paths of
connections in active ontology 1050. For example, in one embodiment of semantic
matching 220, the parse that matches both Local Event At Venue and Venue Name
is given increased evidential support because the combined representations of
these aspects of the user intent are connected by links and/or relations in
active ontology 1050: in this instance, the Local Event node is connected to
the Venue node which is connected to the Venue Name node which is connected to
the entity name in the database of venue names.
[0420] In at least one embodiment, the connections between nodes in an active
ontology that provide evidential support for disambiguating among candidate
semantic parse results 222 are directed arcs, forming an inference lattice, in
which matching nodes provide evidence for nodes to which they are connected by
directed arcs.
HTH,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Ali SH
Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2012
12:09 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Siri's (Apple) Patent Application
Fyi, the Siri patent, dated Jan 19, 2012: