On the Use of Structures for Spoken Language Understanding: A Two-Step Approach

Spoken language understanding (SLU) aims to map a user’s speech into a semantic frame. Since most of the previous works use the semantic structures for SLU, we verify that the structure is useful even for noisy input. We apply a structured prediction method to SLU problem and compare it to an unstructured one. In addition, we present a combined method to embed long-distance dependency between entities in a cascaded manner. On air travel data, we show that our approach improves performance over baseline models. key words: Spoken language understanding, named entity recognition from speech, structured prediction, long-distance dependency, two-step cascaded approach