Applied Artificial Intelligence Technology for Conversational Inferencing and Interactive Natural Language Generation

Disclosed herein is an NLP system that is able to extract meaning from a natural language message using improved parsing techniques. Such an NLP system can be used in concert with an NLG system to interactively interpret messages and generate response messages in an interactive conversational stream. The parsing can include (1) named entity recognition that contextualizes the meanings of words in a message with reference to a knowledge base of named entities understood by the NLP and NLG systems, (2) syntactically parsing the message to determine a grammatical hierarchy for the named entities within the message, (3) reduction of recognized named entities into aggregations of named entities using the determined grammatical hierarchy and reduction rules to further clarify the message's meaning, and (4) mapping the reduced aggregation of named entities to an intent or meaning, wherein this intent/meaning can be used as control instructions for an NLG process.