Improved Spoken Language Representation for Intent Understanding in a Task-Oriented Dialogue System

Successful applications of deep learning technologies in the natural language processing domain have improved text-based intent classifications. However, in practical spoken dialogue applications, the users’ articulation styles and background noises cause automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors, and these may lead language models to misclassify users’ intents. To overcome the limited performance of the intent classification task in the spoken dialogue system, we propose a novel approach that jointly uses both recognized text obtained by the ASR model and a given labeled text. In the evaluation phase, only the fine-tuned recognized language model (RLM) is used. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme is effective at classifying intents in the spoken dialogue system containing ASR errors.