Message handling method, message handling apparatus, and...

Data processing: speech signal processing – linguistics – language – Linguistics – Translation machine

Reexamination Certificate

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Details

C709S202000, C709S228000

Reexamination Certificate

active

06772109

ABSTRACT:

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a data processing technique, and more particularly, to a technique of dynamically changing processing resources depending on the contents of data to be processed.
2. Description of Related Art
A human being is usually capable of determining on what topic a conversation is going and how the utterance by a speaker is interpreted during the course of the conversation from the environmental conditions including the situation in which the speaker is placed, experiences in the past, the identity of the speaker and the flow of the conversation. For instance, suppose that a person sitting in a tea room simply tells to a waitress “a coffee”. The waitress would then interpret the statement in a way that the guest agrees to pay the price of a hot coffee listed on a menu placed in the seat and orders a cup of hot coffee poured in a coffee cup. The waitress further recognizes that the order is accepted for the person, and understands that she should take steps of preparing a cup of hot coffee, adding a spoon, sugar and cream to the cup of hot coffee, bringing them to the table of the person and waiting until the person pays the price.
However, in a different environmental condition such as where the same statement “a coffee,” is uttered to a shopman in a bookstore, the man would not be able to understand the meaning of the utterance. As exemplified above, data is suitably interpreted even if it contains small amount of information when a statement spoken can be flexibly interpreted taking the situation into consideration.
Generally, a “conversation,” between human beings consists of steps in which:
1. a speaker prepares a content to be spoken in order to convey the speaker's intent to a listener;
2. the speaker then begins to speak;
3. the listener listens to the speech and understands the flow of the conversation;
4. the listener associates the speech with the background of the speech from what the listener has experienced;
5. the listener understands the content of the speech;
and
6. the listener takes an action as a result.
If a messaging system of a computer is defined as one which simulates the message processing of a natural language and is designed for recycling by patterning a conversation in this way, a message which is closer to a natural language than the prior art can be processed. As a result, an intelligent message system can be constructed which is more user friendly and allows a series of packets having a certain context to be exchanged with the flow of contexts being followed.
On the other hand, there is mobile agent technology in the art in which an internal condition is moved to a place which is provided in a server existing on a network in a distributed computer environment to form an instruction in the place where the internal condition is moved. Reference is made to U.S. Pat. No.: 5,603,031, issued Feb. 11, 1997, entitled “System and Method For Distributed Computation Based Upon the Movement, Execution, and Interaction of Processes in a Network”, by White et al., (Japanese unexamined patent publication no.: 7-182174) and Fumihiko Nishida, Susumu Fujiwara et al's “Latest Internet Technology, special edition of Nikkei Communication”, pp 104-117, Nikkei BP.
Mobile agents operating under the mobile agent technology discussed above make a contact to other agents (a mobile agent or a resident agent) in the moved-to place and may be served as appropriate. As referred to herein, a place is a location provided by a server existing on the network to which the agent moved and which supports a contact among agents and absorbs the differences between the hardwares and between the platforms.
The mobile agent technology enables a mobile agent to act as a proxy of a human being in handling works such as dynamically adjusting a schedule of internal meetings in compliance with the schedule of attendees and status of reservation of conference rooms and acquiring desired information distributed on the network.
However, if in a single place, various types of communications among the agents is supported, a large load is placed on that place, leading to inability of appropriately responding to the content of conversation and extended processing time which is required for the response. Another load is placed to an agent or a software which issues a request when the request for the service becomes complicated due to the support of various types of communications. Further, the communication system is heavily loaded when the amount of data transmitted over the network is increased. When an interpretation execution element which interprets the content of conversation is changed, a problem was encountered in that the system had to be halted temporarily for restart in registration and importation of changed interpretation execution element because the system relied on a single interpretation execution element.
There was a prior art system which had a compatible class correlating table for the replacement with a compatible resource to maintain interconnection during the period when the network is upgraded to a new version (Japanese unexamined patent publication no.: PUPA 7-93235). However, such a prior art system which inspected the internal status of the system and replaced resources as a result of inspection was not able to analyze a received message to dynamically change the interpretation execution element which interprets the received message. In addition, such a prior art system had to prepare an alternative resource for the resource in which a change occurred so as to avoid the system from halting, resulting in additional load of the user.
In view of the disadvantages of the prior art systems described above, it can be appreciated that it would be desirable to provide a system which overcomes these disadvantages.
OBJECTS AND ADVANTAGES OF THE INVENTION
It is a first object and advantage of this invention to provide a communication system for processing conversations between agents that overcomes the foregoing and other problems.
It is another object and advantage of this invention to provide a communication system which is capable of making a suitable response by means of an analysis execution part in conformance to the content (background concepts or vocabularies) of a conversation among agents.
It is a further object and advantage of this invention to provide a message processing system which enables high speed processing by reducing unnecessary decision logic.
It is still another object and advantage of this invention to provide a message processing system in which resources required for execution are decreased.
It is still a further object of this invention to provide a message processing system which realizes high speed parallel conversation processing.
It is still another object of this invention to reduce the work and the time required for developing and maintaining a program as much as possible in providing a support to communication among agents.
It is still a further object of this invention to provide a message processing system which is capable of flexibly dealing with conversations among agents.
It is still another object of this invention to provide a message processing system which gives less load to a communication network.
Further objects and advantages of this invention will become more apparent from a consideration of the drawings and ensuing description.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The foregoing and other problems are overcome and the objects of the invention are realized by methods and apparatus in accordance with embodiments of this invention. Disclosed is a technique that enables a flexible and smooth information exchange and coordination among agents and between agents and existing systems by dynamically allocating suitable interpretation execution parts in conformance to an ontology which represents an agent communication language, content describing language and a background concept and vocabulary used in a content.
The agent communication system in the preferred embodiment of th

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