Spoken Language Understanding

Abstract

Spoken language understanding (SLU) involves taking the output of the speech recognition component and producing a representation of its meaning that can be used by the dialog manager (DM) to decide what to do next in the interaction. As systems have become more conversational, allowing the user to express their commands and queries in a more natural way, SLU has become a hot topic for the next generation of conversational interfaces. SLU embraces a wide range of technologies that can be used for various tasks involving the processing of text. In this chapter, we provide an overview of these technologies, focusing in particular on those that are relevant to the conversational interface.