Patent ID: 8543401

Claim:
A method for optimizing speech processing in a spoken dialog system, comprising a computer including a processor, and memory, wherein the computer is configured to execute at least one of the steps of the method, the method comprising: providing the spoken dialog system with an initial set of semantic classifiers; collecting and processing a plurality of utterances using the semantic classifiers with the spoken dialog system; transcribing the collected set of utterances; annotating the collected utterances with a semantic category; applying a quality assurance criterion to the annotated utterances; if the quality assurance criterion is met, training a classifier update candidate for the initial set of semantic classifiers using data from the annotated utterances; comparing a performance of the update candidate against the initial set of semantic classifiers by testing the update candidate and the initial set of semantic classifiers against a baseline criterion; and upgrading the initial set of semantic classifiers of the spoken dialog system with the update candidate if the update candidate outperforms the initial set of classifiers; wherein the quality assurance criteria are selected from at least two or more of the group consisting of: completeness of the annotated utterances; consistency of the annotated utterances; congruence of the annotated utterances; correlation of the annotated utterances; confusion of the annotated utterances; coverage of the annotated utterances; and corpus size of the annotated utterances.