Rephrasing Communications in Context

 Advances in assistant communications.  In Google Blog,  As always context is very important. 

Contextual Rephrasing in Google Assistant

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Posted by Aurelien Boffy, Senior Staff Software Engineer, and Roberto Pieraccini, Engineering Director, Google Assistant

When people converse with one another, context and references play a critical role in driving their conversation more efficiently. For instance, if one asks the question “Who wrote Romeo and Juliet?” and, after receiving an answer, asks “Where was he born?”, it is clear that ‘he’ is referring to William Shakespeare without the need to explicitly mention him. Or if someone mentions “python” in a sentence, one can use the context from the conversation to determine whether they are referring to a type of snake or a computer language. If a virtual assistant cannot robustly handle context and references, users would be required to adapt to the limitation of the technology by repeating previously shared contextual information in their follow-up queries to ensure that the assistant understands their requests and can provide relevant answers.

In this post, we present a technology currently deployed on Google Assistant that allows users to speak in a natural manner when referencing context that was defined in previous queries and answers. The technology, based on the latest machine learning (ML) advances, rephrases a user’s follow-up query to explicitly mention the missing contextual information, thus enabling it to be answered as a stand-alone query. While Assistant considers many types of context for interpreting the user input, in this post we are focusing on short-term conversation history.

Context Handling by Rephrasing

One of the approaches taken by Assistant to understand contextual queries is to detect if an input utterance is referring to previous context and then rephrase it internally to explicitly include the missing information. Following on from the previous example in which the user asked who wrote Romeo and Juliet, one may ask follow-up questions like “When?”. Assistant recognizes that this question is referring to both the subject (Romeo and Juliet) and answer from the previous query (William Shakespeare) and can rephrase “When?” to “When did William Shakespeare write Romeo and Juliet?”

While there are other ways to handle context, for instance, by applying rules directly to symbolic representations of the meaning of queries, like intents and arguments, the advantage of the rephrasing approach is that it operates horizontally at the string level across any query answering, parsing, or action fulfillment module.  ... '