Patent Application
20180285904
This application claims priority to Spanish Application No. P 201700339, filed Mar. 30, 2017.
Large events (e.g., lectures, conferences, and the like) are increasingly using interactive online question and answer (Q&A) tools to offer real-time feedback. For instance, there are a number of mobile, real-time Q&A tools in the marketplace that enable participants to respond to content, ask questions, answer questions, or otherwise provide comments during an event, for instance, utilizing their mobile devices on mobile browsers. While offering much useful feedback, there can be instances in which the number of questions or other contributions becomes so numerous that either the number of duplicate and/or highly-related contributions increases because a participant cannot keep up with them all, thus decreasing the overall quality of the contributions, or participants begin to miss content associated with the actual event because they are distracted by viewing and/or addressing the contributions provided by other participants and/or event coordinators.
This Summary is provided to introduce a selection of concepts in a simplified form that are further described below in the Detailed Description. This Summary is not intended to identify key features or essential features of the claimed subject matter, nor should it be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.
Embodiments of the present disclosure relate to systems and methods that aid users participating in events employing interactive online Q&A tools in meaningfully contributing to the Q&A with minimal loss of attention to the event. In this regard, embodiments of the present disclosure provide systems and methods that present to a user, while the user is inputting an event contribution, similar event contributions (e.g., provided by other event participants) and permit the user to act upon the similar in lieu of completing and/or publishing his or her own contribution. Input of an event contribution fragment is detected. While the event contribution fragment is being input (e.g., while the user is typing his or her event contribution but prior to completion thereof), a probable event contribution completion for the user's event contribution fragment is predicted. Based upon the predicted event contribution completion, at least one semantically-similar, prior-received event contribution is provided to the user. Also provided is the ability for the user to act upon the prior-received contribution in lieu of completing and/or publishing his or her own event contribution. For instance, the user may be provided the ability to vote on, comment on, or amend the semantically-similar, prior-received event contribution in lieu of completing and/or publishing his or her own contribution. Upon receiving an indication of a desired user action with respect to the semantically-similar, prior-received event contribution, the user-input event contribution fragment is discarded and the user's action on the prior-received event contribution is published in lieu thereof.
The present invention is described in detail below with reference to the attached drawing figures, wherein:
The subject matter of the present disclosure is described with specificity herein to meet statutory requirements. However, the description itself is not intended to limit the scope of this patent. Rather, the inventors have contemplated that the claimed subject matter might also be embodied in other ways, to include different steps or combinations of steps similar to the ones described in this document, in conjunction with other present or future technologies. Moreover, although the terms “step” and/or “block” may be used herein to connote different elements of methods employed, the terms should not be interpreted as implying any particular order among or between various steps herein disclosed unless and except when the order of individual steps is explicitly described. As used herein, the singular forms “a,” “an,” and “the” are intended to include the plural forms as well, unless the context clearly indicates otherwise.
“Event contribution” as used in the description below refers to completed and/or published text input (via typing input, speech input, or any other input modality) by a user of an event employing an interactive online Q&A tool.
“Event contribution fragment” refers to the text of an event contribution that has begun to be input by a user but has yet to be completed and/or published. Generally, completion of an event contribution fragment (which changes its status to an “event contribution” rather than an “event contribution fragment”) is signaled upon publication of the input text.
“Contribution identifier” refers to a unique identifier assigned to an event contribution or event contribution fragment that enables information with respect thereto to be identified, for instance, via a look-up table.
As previously set forth in the Background, large events, such as lectures, conferences, etc., are increasingly using interactive online question and answer (Q&A) tools to offer real-time feedback. For instance, there are a number of mobile, real-time Q&A tools in the marketplace that enable participants to ask questions, respond to questions (for instance, posed by the event coordinators or provided by other participants), or otherwise provide comments or feedback during an event, for instance, utilizing their mobile devices on mobile browsers. While offering much useful feedback, there can be instances in which the number of questions or other contributions becomes so numerous that the number of duplicate and/or highly-related contributions increases because users cannot keep up with them all. This results in a decrease in the overall quality of the contributions. Further, users may begin to overlook or otherwise miss content associated with the actual event because they are distracted by viewing and/or addressing the contributions provided by other participants and/or event coordinators.
Embodiments of the present disclosure are generally directed to systems and methods that aid users participating in events employing interactive online Q&A tools in meaningfully contributing to the Q&A with minimal loss of attention to the event. In this regard, embodiments of the present disclosure provide systems and methods that present to a user, while the user is inputting an event contribution fragment, similar event contributions (e.g., provided by other event participants) and permit the user to act upon the similar contributions in lieu of completing and/or publishing his or her own event contribution fragment. Input of an event contribution fragment is detected. While the event contribution fragment is being input (e.g., while the user is typing his or her event contribution but prior to completion and/or publication thereof), a probable event contribution completion for the user's event contribution fragment is predicted. Based upon the predicted event contribution completion, at least one semantically-similar, prior-received event contribution is provided to the user. Also provided is the ability for the user to act upon the prior-received event contribution in lieu of completing and/or publishing his or her own event contribution. For instance, the user may be provided the ability to vote on, comment on, or amend the semantically-similar, prior-received event contribution in lieu of completing and/or publishing his or her own contribution. Upon receiving an indication of a desired user action with respect to the semantically-similar, prior-received event contribution, the user-input event contribution fragment is discarded and the user's action on the prior-received event contribution is published in lieu thereof.
By way of example, and with reference to
Based upon the predicted event contribution completion determined most probable (as more fully described below), at least one semantically-similar, prior-received event contribution is presented to the user. In the user interface 100 illustrated in
Upon receiving an indication of a desired user action with respect to a semantically-similar, prior-received event contribution (112 or 114), the user-input event contribution fragment is discarded and the user's action on the prior-received event contribution (112 or 114) is published in lieu of the user-input event contribution fragment 110 or a completion thereof. For instance, user selection of a voting indicator 118 may result in the input event contribution fragment being discarded and the number of votes associated with the event contribution related to the selected voting indicator 118 being incremented upward by one unit. User selection of an amend indicator 120 may result in presentation of a user interface (not shown) that presents the text of the event contribution related to the selected amend indicator 120 and permits amending thereof followed by publication. In this instance, the amended contribution may be displayed as a separate event contribution to later users, or as a sub-contribution to the associated contribution. User selection of a comment indicator 122 may cause presentation of a user interface (not shown) that permits the user to input a comment related to the event contribution associated with the selected comment indicator 122 and publish the same. Again, this comment may be presented as a separate contribution to later users, or as a sub-contribution to the associated event contribution.
Accordingly, one embodiment of the present disclosure is directed to a method for aiding event participants in meaningfully contributing to event online Q&A with minimal loss of attention to the event. The method includes providing configuration parameters for a crowd consensus tool to a plurality of devices, the configuration parameters including an event contribution prediction model derived from at least one of general language reference material, event-specific material, prior-received event contributions, or a combination thereof. The method further includes receiving a discarded event contribution fragment and a contribution identifier associated with a prior-received event contribution acted upon in lieu of publishing the discarded event contribution fragment, updating the configuration parameters utilizing the discarded event contribution fragment and the contribution identifier associated with the prior-received event contribution that was acted upon lieu of publishing the discarded event contribution fragment, and providing the updated configuration parameters to the plurality of devices.
In another embodiment, the present disclosure is directed to another method for aiding event participants in meaningfully contributing to event online Q&A with minimal loss of attention to the event. The method includes detecting user input of an event contribution fragment, predicting at least one probable event contribution completion from the event contribution fragment, determining at least one prior-received event contribution that is semantically-similar to the at least one probable event contribution completion, presenting the at least one semantically-similar prior-received event contribution, and providing an ability for a user to act upon the at least one semantically-similar prior-received event contribution.
In yet another embodiment, the present disclosure is directed to a computerized system for aiding event participants in meaningfully contributing to event online Q&A with minimal loss of attention to the event. The system includes a processor and a computer storage medium storing computer-useable instructions that, when used by the processor, cause the processor to: provide configuration parameters to a plurality of devices, detect user input of an event contribution fragment, predict at least one probable event contribution completion from the event contribution fragment, determine at least one prior-received event contribution that is semantically-similar to the at least one probable event contribution completion, provide the at least one semantically-similar prior-received event contribution and an ability for a user to act upon the at least one semantically-similar prior-received event contribution, receive a user action with respect to the at least one semantically-similar prior-received event contribution, and discard the event contribution fragment.
Referring now to
In some embodiments, one or more of the illustrated components/modules may be implemented as stand-alone applications. In other embodiments, one or more of the illustrated components/modules may be implemented via a server or as an Internet-based service. It will be understood by those having ordinary skill in the art that the components/modules illustrated in
It should be understood that the crowd consensus system 200 generally operates to aid users in meaningfully contributing to an online Q&A session during an event with minimal loss of attention to the event. It should be further understood that the crowd consensus system 200 shown in
With continued reference to
Once an event participant inputs text into an event contribution input box (e.g., box 110 of
Once an event participant inputs text into an event contribution input box (e.g., box 110 of
Keeping the number of occurrences in the nodes/edges, rather than the probabilities, enables the merging of different models, as shown in
In accordance with embodiments of the present disclosure, computed models (e.g., hierarchical Markov models) are used by the user device (e.g., user device 210 of
Turning now to
The second technique is a machine learning technique. This technique is built using discarded event contribution fragments. As an example of a possible classifier 514 of such task, a K-nearest neighbors approach may be used, using the string amend distance between the list of probable contribution completions and previously discarded event contribution fragments. The outcome of this classifier is a list of candidate prior-received contributions with an associated probability.
To create a sorted list of semantically-similar prior-received contributions, each contribution in the list of probable contribution completions includes an associated probability. If the event contribution fragment consists of whole, completed words, the probability is equal to one and the list will contain a single entry. Each entry will go through both recommendation modules (similarity of word strings and machine learning classifier) and this will yield two lists of candidate semantically-similar prior-received contributions with associated distances/probabilities. (Note if it is a distance, it can be converted into a probability mapping probability 1.0 to distance 0 and probability 0.0 to values over a defined distance threshold, doing a uniform distribution in the range, or by using some exponential function like e to the power of −distance.). The final probability of each combination of entry in the list and candidate semantically-similar prior-received contribution will be obtained by multiplying the probability of the entry with the probability of the candidate.
In accordance with embodiments of the present disclosure, the Q&A server (e.g., Q&A server 214 of
When a user decides to discard an event contribution fragment in favor of acting upon (e.g., voting on, commenting on, amending, etc.) a prior-received contribution, the user device provides, to the Q&A server, the discarded text plus a contribution identifier associated with the acted upon contribution. The Q&A server trains a supervised classifier (for instance, a K-nearest neighbor classifier) and updates all user devices when the classifier has reached a threshold number of discarded event contribution fragments received.
The Q&A server also updates the word predictor based upon the other prior-received event contributions and the event-specific material. In this regard, if the event-specific material is sequentially presented to the event participants (e.g., in a large event in which people participating have not been exposed to the material before), the Q&A server may take into account that participants are more likely to ask questions about topics when the topics are being presented to them. To do so, the Q&A server may try to locate the current location of the “speech” by considering the word distribution of the received contributions within a given, recent time frame, and then modify the word predictor by considering the information presented thus far, possibly giving extra weight to later-introduced concepts.
Turning now to
With reference to
Having described embodiments of the present disclosure, an exemplary operating environment in which embodiments of the present disclosure may be implemented is described below in order to provide a general context for various aspects of the present disclosure. Referring to
The inventive embodiments may be described in the general context of computer code or machine-useable instructions, including computer-executable instructions such as program modules, being executed by a computer or other machine, such as a personal data assistant or other handheld device. Generally, program modules including routines, programs, objects, components, data structures, etc., refer to code that perform particular tasks or implement particular abstract data types. The inventive embodiments may be practiced in a variety of system configurations, including handheld devices, consumer electronics, general-purpose computers, more specialty computing devices, etc. The inventive embodiments may also be practiced in distributed computing environments where tasks are performed by remote-processing devices that are linked through a communications network.
With continued reference to
The computing device 800 typically includes a variety of computer-readable media. Computer-readable media can be any available media that can be accessed by computing device 800 and includes both volatile and nonvolatile media, removable and non-removable media. By way of example, and not limitation, computer-readable media may comprise computer storage media and communication media. Computer storage media includes volatile and nonvolatile, removable and non-removable media implemented in any method or technology for storage of information such as computer-readable instructions, data structures, program modules, or other data. Computer storage media includes, but is not limited to, RAM, ROM, EEPROM, flash memory or other memory technology, CD-ROM, digital versatile disks (DVD) or other optical disk storage, magnetic cassettes, magnetic tape, magnetic disk storage or other magnetic storage devices, or any other medium which can be used to store the desired information and which can be accessed by computing device 800. Computer storage media does not comprise signals per se. Communication media typically embodies computer-readable instructions, data structures, program modules, or other data in a modulated data signal such as a carrier wave or other transport mechanism and includes any information delivery media. The term “modulated data signal” means a signal that has one or more of its characteristics set or changed in such a manner as to encode information in the signal. By way of example, and not limitation, communication media includes wired media such as a wired network or direct-wired connection, and wireless media such as acoustic, RF, infrared, and other wireless media. Combinations of any of the above should also be included within the scope of computer-readable media.
Memory 812 includes computer-storage media in the form of volatile and/or nonvolatile memory. The memory may be removable, non-removable, or a combination thereof. Exemplary hardware devices include solid-state memory, hard drives, optical-disc drives, etc. The computing device 800 includes one or more processors that read data from various entities such as the memory 812 or I/O components 820. The presentation component(s) 816 present data indications to a user or other device. Exemplary presentation components include a display device, speaker, printing component, vibrating component, etc.
The I/O ports 818 allow the computing device 800 to be logically coupled to other devices including the I/O components 820, some of which may be built in. Illustrative components include a microphone, joystick, game pad, satellite dish, scanner, printer, wireless device, etc. The I/O components 820 may provide a natural user interface (NUI) that processes air gestures, voice, or other physiological inputs generated by a user. In some instances, inputs may be transmitted to an appropriate network element for further processing. An NUI may implement any combination of speech recognition, touch and stylus recognition, facial recognition, biometric recognition, gesture recognition both on screen and adjacent to the screen, air gestures, head and eye tracking, and touch recognition associated with displays on the computing device 800. The computing device 800 may be equipped with depth cameras, such as stereoscopic camera systems, infrared camera systems, RGB camera systems, and combinations of these, for gesture detection and recognition. Additionally, the computing device 800 may be equipped with accelerometers or gyroscopes that enable detection of motion. The output of the accelerometers or gyroscopes may be provided to the display of the computing device 800 to render immersive augmented reality or virtual reality.
As can be understood, embodiments of the present disclosure provide for aiding event participants in meaningfully contributing to event online Q&A with minimal loss of attention to the event. The present disclosure has been described in relation to particular embodiments, which are intended in all respects to be illustrative rather than restrictive. Alternative embodiments will become apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art to which the present disclosure pertains without departing from its scope.
From the foregoing, it will be seen that this disclosure is one well adapted to attain all the ends and objects set forth above, together with other advantages which are obvious and inherent to the system and method. It will be understood that certain features and sub-combinations are of utility and may be employed without reference to other features and sub-combinations. This is contemplated by and is within the scope of the claims.
| Number | Date | Country | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|
| P 201700339 | Mar 2017 | ES | national |
