US Patent 10304444 Fine-grained natural language understanding

A system capable of performing natural language understanding (NLU) without the concept of a domain that influences NLU results. The present system uses a hierarchical organizations of intents/commands and entity types, and trained models associated with those hierarchies, so that commands and entity types may be determined for incoming text queries without necessarily determining a domain for the incoming text. The system thus operates in a domain agnostic manner, in a departure from multi-domain architecture NLU processing where a system determines NLU results for multiple domains simultaneously and then ranks them to determine which to select as the result.