Patent ID: 8818793

Claim:
A method comprising: annotating data by: inserting, via a processor and via a discriminative classification approach independent of using n-grams, boundary tags at boundaries in a speech utterance text based on a training with weighted examples, wherein higher weights indicate more difficult examples, and wherein the boundary tags comprise one of a phrase boundary tag, a sentence boundary tag, and a paragraph boundary tag, to yield boundary marked speech utterance text; thereafter, inserting an edit tag in the boundary marked speech utterance text, to yield edited text and unedited text, wherein the edit tag identifies a portion of the speech utterance text to be removed based on repeated words which do not contribute to language understanding, and wherein the speech utterance text has not been processed to identify clauses; thereafter, inserting conjunction tags within the unedited text which identify, without relying on punctuation cues, coordinating conjunctions selected from a list comprising {and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet}, to yield conjunction tag text; and identifying clauses within the speech utterance text based on the boundary marked speech utterance text, the edited text, and the conjunction tag text to yield annotated data; and iteratively repeating the annotating of the data, where each successive iteration has a longer turn than an immediately preceding iteration and each successive iteration is used to retrain a model associated with the discriminative classification approach.