Patent ID: 7620550

Claim:
A computing device for generating a natural language understanding (NLU) model for use in a spoken dialog service, the computing device comprising a processor and further comprising: (a) a module configured to control the processor to use sample utterances to create at least one hand crafted rule for each call-type defined in a labeling guide, wherein each call-type comprises a call category with at least one defined attribute; (b) a module configured to control the processor to generate and test a first NLU model using the at least one hand crafted rule and sample utterances; (c) a module configured to control the processor to build a second NLU model using the sample utterances as new training data and using the at least one hand crafted rule; (d) a module configured to control the processor to test the performance of the second NLU model using a first batch of labeled data; (e) a module configured to control the processor to (1) build a series of NLU models by adding a previous batch of labeled data to training data and (2) use a new batch of labeling data as test data to generate the series of NLU models with training data that increases constantly; (f) a module configured, if not all the labeling data is received, to control the processor to repeat steps performed by module (e) until all labeling data is received; and (g) a module configured, after all the training data is received, at least once, to control the processor to build a third NLU model using all the labeling data, wherein the third NLU model is used in generating the spoken dialog service.