IP Library Granted Patent US 12,451,132
Granted Patent B2
US 12,451,132 · App. 18/107,620 · Granted Oct 21, 2025

Methods and systems for determining characteristics of a dialog between a computer and a user

Inventors: Tuan Manh Lai (Lafayette, IN); Trung Bui (San Jose, CA); Quan Tran (San Jose, CA)
Assignee: Adobe Inc.
G10L15/22G10L15/02G10L15/1822G10L15/183
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Quick Facts
Patent No.
US 12,451,132
App. No.
18/107,620
Granted
Oct 21, 2025
Kind
B2
Abstract

A computer-implemented method is disclosed for determining one or more characteristics of a dialog between a computer system and user. The method may comprise receiving a system utterance comprising one or more tokens defining one or more words generated by the computer system; receiving a user utterance comprising one or more tokens defining one or more words uttered by a user in response to the system utterance, the system utterance and the user utterance forming a dialog context; receiving one or more utterance candidates comprising one or more tokens; for each utterance candidate, generating an input sequence combining the one or more tokens of each of the system utterance, the user utterance, and the utterance candidate; and for each utterance candidate, evaluating the generated input sequence with a model to determine a probability that the utterance candidate is relevant to the dialog context.

Claims (38)

1. A method comprising:

receiving, by a processing device, a system utterance and a user utterance;

generating, by the processing device, a dialog sequence by encoding the system utterance and the user utterance into a series of vectors;

identifying, by the processing device, a candidate topic represented as a candidate vector associated with a characteristic of the dialog sequence;

determining, by the processing device using a machine learning model, a relevance score indicating a probability that the candidate topic is relevant to the dialog sequence by comparing the candidate vector to the series of vectors; and

generating, by the processing device, data indicating a dialog context including the candidate topic based on the relevance score.

2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising replacing the candidate topic with a different candidate topic based on the relevance score.

3. The method of claim 1 , further comprising determining whether the relevance score meets a threshold of relevance to the dialog sequence.

4. The method of claim 3 , further comprising updating the dialog sequence to include the candidate topic if the relevance score meets the threshold of relevance to the dialog sequence.

5. The method of claim 1 , further comprising generating a response to the user utterance based on the candidate topic and the dialog sequence.

6. The method of claim 1 , wherein the characteristic of the dialog sequence is a state of a dialog between a system and a user.

7. The method of claim 1 , wherein each vector in the series of vectors is assigned to a word in the dialog sequence.

8. The method of claim 1 , further comprising selecting the candidate topic from a plurality of potential topics.

9. The method of claim 1 , wherein the probability that the candidate topic is relevant to the dialog sequence is calculated using a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model.

10. A system comprising:

a memory component; and

a processing device to perform operations comprising:

receiving a user utterance including user utterance tokens defining words generated by a user;

forming a dialog token sequence representing a dialog sequence by combining the user utterance tokens with system utterance tokens defining words of a system utterance generated by a computer system in response to the user utterance;

identifying a candidate topic represented as candidate topic tokens associated with a characteristic of the dialog sequence;

generating an input sequence by combining the dialog token sequence with the candidate topic tokens;

determining, using a machine learning model, a relevance score indicating a probability that the candidate topic is relevant to the dialog sequence by comparing the candidate topic tokens to the dialog token sequence; and

generating data indicating a dialog context including the candidate topic based on the relevance score.

11. The system of claim 10 , wherein each token in the dialog token sequence is assigned to a word in the dialog sequence.

12. The system of claim 10 , wherein the user utterance is a question and the system utterance is an answer to the question.

13. The system of claim 10 , wherein the user utterance tokens and the system utterance tokens are separated with a separator token representing a start of an utterance.

14. The system of claim 10 , further comprising determining whether the relevance score meets a threshold of relevance to the dialog sequence.

15. The system of claim 14 , further comprising updating the dialog sequence to include the candidate topic if the relevance score meets the threshold of relevance to the dialog sequence.

16. A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing executable instructions, which when executed by a processing device, cause the processing device to perform operations comprising:

receiving a system utterance and a user utterance;

generating a dialog sequence by encoding the system utterance and the user utterance into a series of vectors;

identifying a candidate topic represented as a candidate vector associated with a characteristic of the dialog sequence;

determining, using a machine learning model, a relevance score indicating a probability that the candidate topic is relevant to the dialog sequence by comparing the candidate vector to the series of vectors; and

generating data indicating a dialog context including the candidate topic based on the relevance score.

17. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 16 , further comprising replacing the candidate topic with a different candidate topic based on the relevance score.

18. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 16 , wherein the characteristic of the dialog sequence is a state of a dialog between a system and a user.

19. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 16 , further comprising selecting the candidate topic from a plurality of potential topics.

20. The method of claim 1 , wherein the data indicating the dialog context includes a description of the dialog sequence.

Continuity (2)
Continuation 16889669 · Jun 1, 2020
Related Publication 20230197081A1 · Jun 22, 2023
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