Nuance Reasoning Framework Prateek Jain, Peter Z. Yeh, Ezra Story, Julien Villemure, David Martin, William Jarrold Nuance Communications Inc., Sunnyvale CA 94085, USA {firstname.lastname}@nuance.com Abstract. In this paper, we report on an extensible reasoning frame- work developed at Nuance Communications that allows a variety of spe- cialized reasoners to be used simultaneously. We report on the key design features of our reasoning framework, and provide a real world use case in the automotive domain. Keywords: reasoning framework, plug-n-play framework 1 Overview Nuance Communications has developed an extensible reasoning framework that allows a variety of specialized reasoners to be combined and used simultaneously (e.g. specialized domain reasoners or spatial reasoners). This is an important, strategic requirement as numerous industries (ranging from automotive to me- dia) move towards providing intelligent interactions for their users through vir- tual assistants that can reason about their users’ preferences, context, and more to provide personalized and efficient interactions. Nuance’s Reasoning Framework (NRF) achieves this capability through the following design features: 1. A plug-and-play architecture that allows different reasoners and reasoning technologies to be added via a common API. New reasoners need to imple- ment the common interface, but the underlying reasoning technology can be a black box. 2. An arbitration module that determines and selects the appropriate reasoners to invoke based on each reasoner’s capability and the user’s request, plus context. This module can be extended with custom arbitration strategies as needed. 3. A mediation module that combines the conclusions of the invoked reasoners into a consistent conclusion. Like the arbitration module, this module can also be extended with custom mediation strategies. NRF is underpinned by several semantic technologies including SPARQL[2] as an interlingua to capture a user’s request, RDF[1] to represent user preferences and context, etc.