Effective Spoken Language Labeling with Deep Recurrent Neural Networks

Understanding spoken language is a highly complex problem, which can be decomposed into several simpler tasks. In this paper, we focus on Spoken Language Understanding (SLU), the module of spoken dialog systems responsible for extracting a semantic interpretation from the user utterance. The task is treated as a labeling problem. In the past, SLU has been performed with a wide variety of probabilistic models. The rise of neural networks, in the last couple of years, has opened new interesting research directions in this domain. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) in particular are able not only to represent several pieces of information as embeddings but also, thanks to their recurrent architecture, to encode as embeddings relatively long contexts. Such long contexts are in general out of reach for models previously used for SLU. In this paper we propose novel RNNs architectures for SLU which outperform previous ones. Starting from a published idea as base block, we design new deep RNNs achieving state-of-the-art results on two widely used corpora for SLU: ATIS (Air Traveling Information System), in English, and MEDIA (Hotel information and reservation in France), in French.