Grammar Learning for Spoken Language Understanding

Many state-of-the-art conversational systems use semantic-based robust understanding and manually derived grammars, a very time-consuming and error-prone process. This paper describes a machine-aided grammar authoring system that enables a programmer to develop rapidly a high quality grammar for conversational systems. This is achieved with a combination of domain-specific semantics, a library grammar, syntactic constraints and a small number of example sentences that have been semantically annotated. Our experiments show that the learned semantic grammars consistently outperform manually authored grammars, requiring much less authoring load.