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Please predict whether this patent is acceptable.PATENT ABSTRACT: Embodiments include methods and systems for using, creating and maintaining goal-oriented, dialog systems (i.e., transactional bots) that provide interfaces to application functionality. The methods and systems of the embodiments provide a bot that may learn in supervised learning and reinforcement learning from conversational examples provided by domain experts and from interaction with users. Conversational bots may be created to interact using both text and/or application programming interface (API) calls. A developer may configure a bot that interfaces with an application back-end where behavior of the bot may be controlled by use of masking actions. A specification for the bot may be flexibly designed to specify how developer code may be organized, for example, as masking operations on the possible actions the bot may execute. Additionally, the methods and systems may automatically infer the best state representation during a dialog so a state variable need not be predefined.