US 12,288,039 B1
Applied artificial intelligence technology for adaptively classifying sentences based on the concepts they express to improve natural language understanding
Michael Justin Smathers, Chicago, IL (US); Daniel Joseph Platt, Chicago, IL (US); Nathan D. Nichols, Chicago, IL (US); and Jared Lorince, Skokie, IL (US)
Assigned to Salesforce, Inc., San Francisco, CA (US)
Filed by Salesforce, Inc., San Francisco, CA (US)
Filed on Jan. 16, 2020, as Appl. No. 16/744,537.
Claims priority of provisional application 62/797,787, filed on Jan. 28, 2019.
This patent is subject to a terminal disclaimer.
Int. Cl. G06F 40/56 (2020.01); G06F 18/214 (2023.01)
CPC G06F 40/56 (2020.01) [G06F 18/2155 (2023.01)] 39 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A method for applying artificial intelligence technology to natural language understanding, the method comprising:
processing a plurality of sentences via a processor using a classifier that is configured to distinguish between a plurality of concepts expressed by the plurality of sentences based on sentence composition and sentence structure, wherein the plurality of concepts comprise higher level meanings that are expressed by the sentences beyond literal meanings of words in the sentences, a first subset of the plurality of sentences being associated with respective concepts of the plurality of concepts based on the classifier;
identifying via the processor a second subset of the plurality of sentences that are unclassified by the classifier;
clustering the unclassified sentences into sentence clusters based on defined criteria and one or more characteristics shared among dependency parse trees corresponding to the unclassified sentences;
providing via the processor a user interface (UI) facilitating review of the unclassified sentences according to the sentence clusters;
receiving user input associating an unclassified sentence of the second subset of the plurality of sentences with a concept of the plurality of concepts; and
training a natural language generation (NLG) system based on the unclassified sentence to: interactively receive natural language user input,
interactively receive stylistic selection user input indicative of one or more of the plurality of sentences and/or plurality of concepts, and
interactively determine natural language output responsive to the natural language input and expressing the associated concept in a manner that stylistically resembles the one or more sentences and/or concepts with respect to sentence composition and sentence structure.