Patent 9805718 was granted and assigned to SRI International on October, 2017 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A dialog assistant embodied in a computing system can present a clarification question based on a machine-readable version of human-generated conversational natural language input. Some versions of the dialog assistant identify a clarification target in the machine-readable version, determine a clarification type relating to the clarification target, present the clarification question in a conversational natural language manner, and process a human-generated conversational natural language response to the clarification question.