System and method of extracting clauses for spoken language understanding

A system comprising:

• a processor;
• and
• a computer-readable storage medium having instructions stored which, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to perform operations comprising:
• inserting, via a discriminative classification approach, boundary tags into speech utterance text, the boundary tags identifying boundaries selected from a group comprising phrase boundaries, sentence boundaries, and paragraph boundaries, wherein the discriminative classification approach utilizes syntactic features before and after each word being tagged, to yield boundary marked speech utterance text;
• inserting, via the discriminative classification approach, edit tags in the boundary marked speech utterance text to identify at least one word of a set of duplicated words, to yield edited text and unedited text, wherein each edit tag comprises edit span information indicating how many words to the left of each edit tag to edit;
• identifying coordinating conjunctions within the unedited text based on a conjunction tag, to yield identified coordinating conjunctions;
• and
• identifying clauses in the speech utterance text based on the boundary marked speech utterance text, the edited text, and the identified coordinating conjunctions.

A computer-readable storage device having instructions stored which, when executed by a computing device, cause the computing device to perform operations comprising:

• inserting, via a discriminative classification approach, boundary tags into speech utterance text, the boundary tags identifying boundaries selected from a group comprising phrase boundaries, sentence boundaries, and paragraph boundaries, wherein the discriminative classification approach utilizes syntactic features before and after each word being tagged, to yield boundary marked speech utterance text;
• inserting, via the discriminative classification approach, edit tags in the boundary marked speech utterance text to identify at least one word of a set of duplicated words, to yield edited text and unedited text, wherein each edit tag comprises edit span information indicating how many words to the left of each edit tag to edit;
• identifying coordinating conjunctions within the unedited text based on a conjunction tag, to yield identified coordinating conjunctions;
• and
• identifying clauses in the speech utterance text based on the boundary marked speech utterance text, the edited text, and the identified coordinating conjunctions.