The AT&T spoken language understanding system

Spoken language understanding (SLU) aims at extracting meaning from natural language speech. Over the past decade, a variety of practical goal-oriented spoken dialog systems have been built for limited domains. SLU in these systems ranges from understanding predetermined phrases through fixed grammars, extracting some predefined named entities, extracting users' intents for call classification, to combinations of users' intents and named entities. In this paper, we present the SLU system of VoiceTone® (a service provided by AT&T where AT&T develops, deploys and hosts spoken dialog applications for enterprise customers). The SLU system includes extracting both intents and the named entities from the users' utterances. For intent determination, we use statistical classifiers trained from labeled data, and for named entity extraction we use rule-based fixed grammars. The focus of our work is to exploit data and to use machine learning techniques to create scalable SLU systems which can be quickly deployed for new domains with minimal human intervention. These objectives are achieved by 1) using the predicate-argument representation of semantic content of an utterance; 2) extending statistical classifiers to seamlessly integrate hand crafted classification rules with the rules learned from data; and 3) developing an active learning framework to minimize the human labeling effort for quickly building the classifier models and adapting them to changes. We present an evaluation of this system using two deployed applications of VoiceTone®.