The Utterance Classification (UC) method has become a developer’s choice over traditional Context Free Grammars (CFGs) for voice menus in telephony applications. This data driven method achieves higher accuracy and has great potential to utilize a huge amount of labeled training data.

But, having a human manually label the training data can be expensive. This paper provides a robust recipe for training a UC system using inexpensive acoustic data with limited transcriptions or semantic labels. It also describes two new algorithms that use caller confirmation, which naturally occurred within a dialog, to generate pseudo semantic labels.

Experimental results show that, after having sufficient labeled data to achieve a reasonable accuracy, both of our algorithms can use unlabeled data to achieve the same performance as a system trained with labeled data, while completely eliminating the need for human supervision.

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In  Interspeech

Publisher  International Speech Communication Association

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