Query responses

In this article we consider the phenomenon of answering a query with a query. Although such answers are common, no large scale, corpus-based characterization exists, with the exception of clarification requests. After briefly reviewing different theoretical approaches on this subject, we present a corpus study of query responses in the British National Corpus and develop a taxonomy for query responses. We point at a variety of response categories that have not been formalized in previous dialogue work, particularly those relevant to adversarial interaction. We show that different response categories have significantly different rates of subsequent answer provision. We provide a formal analysis of the response categories in the framework of KoS

Customized query responses based on available appliances

This disclosure describes techniques to provide customized responses to user queries for household tasks, e.g., use of an appliance such as a washer/dryer. The responses are customized based on information regarding appliances available within the household, obtained with user permission. The query may be received by a virtual assistant, e.g., available via a household appliance, or via device such as a smartphone, smart speaker, personal computer, etc. Information regarding the appliances is obtained, e.g., by indexing product manuals and other information. Results are provided that guide the user to complete the household task using an available appliance

Differential Privacy in Metric Spaces: Numerical, Categorical and Functional Data Under the One Roof

We study Differential Privacy in the abstract setting of Probability on metric spaces. Numerical, categorical and functional data can be handled in a uniform manner in this setting. We demonstrate how mechanisms based on data sanitisation and those that rely on adding noise to query responses fit within this framework. We prove that once the sanitisation is differentially private, then so is the query response for any query. We show how to construct sanitisations for high-dimensional databases using simple 1-dimensional mechanisms. We also provide lower bounds on the expected error for differentially private sanitisations in the general metric space setting. Finally, we consider the question of sufficient sets for differential privacy and show that for relaxed differential privacy, any algebra generating the Borel $\sigma$-algebra is a sufficient set for relaxed differential privacy.Comment: 18 Page

HIDING BEHIND THE CLOUDS: EFFICIENT, PRIVACY-PRESERVING QUERIES VIA CLOUD PROXIES

This project proposes PriView, a privacy-preserving technique for querying third-party ser- vices from mobile devices. Classical private information retrieval (PIR) schemes are diffi- cult to deploy and use, since they require the target service to be replicated and modified. To avoid this problem, PriView utilizes a novel, proxy-mediated form of PIR, in which the client device fetches XORs of dummy query responses from each of two proxies and combines them to produce the required result. Unlike conventional PIR, PriView does not require the third-party service to be replicated or modified in any way. We evaluated a PriView implementation for the Google Static Maps service utilizing an Android OS front- end and Amazon EC2 proxies. PriView is able to provide tunable confidentiality with low overhead, allowing bandwidth usage, power consumption, and end-to-end latency to scale sublinearly with the provided degree of confidentiality

Selective Delivery of Private Information on Device Lock Screen in Trusted Contexts

To avoid inadvertently revealing private information, delivery of query responses and notifications is restricted when a device is in a locked state, based on user configuration. In many contexts, e.g., when using the device in a hands-free mode while engaged in activities such as cooking or driving, the user can benefit from receiving such information without having to unlock the device. This disclosure describes techniques that permit users to receive results on the device lock screen for queries made to a virtual assistant and for notifications without needing to unlock the device first. The techniques provide flexible display of query responses or notifications with private content on the lock screen of a locked device. In addition to always-on suppression or display of such content, the techniques also enable selective display on the lock screen when in trusted contexts but not otherwise

User Interface To Present Query Responses Separated By Data Sources

Pieces of information that are responsive to user queries are typically personalized to the user. Information delivered in response to the user’s query can be derived from a variety of data sources, some of which are on the user’s device and some that are online. However, the response is typically delivered independent of the underlying data source from which the information is obtained. As a result, the user interface that shows the results does not enable a user to determine whether the response is based on public or user-specific information and whether it was retrieved from online or local data sources. This disclosure presents UI techniques that provide a visual mechanism to help surface the underlying source(s) of data from which responses to the user’s query are derived