US Patent 7558819 Distributed dialoguing with an agent-oriented software architecture

Roughly described, a natural language interpretation system develops its interpretation in response to user input, and also in dependence upon the interpretation, rather than the claims, made in response to prior input. In policy conditions, an agent can check whether any specified agent contributed to the prior interpretation and adjust its claiming of the present input accordingly. In policy actions, a policy or agent can reference the prior interpretation both for conditioning the policy's or agent's contribution to the current interpretation, and also for incorporating part or all of the prior interpretation in the policy's or agent's contribution to the current interpretation. The resulting system thus implements dialoging in a distributed manner as part of the various agents in the interpretation network, and allows much more flexibility to better respond in accordance with users' expectations.