Using dialog context to improve language understanding

Abstract

Described herein is a mechanism for improving the accuracy of a language model interpreting short input utterances. A language model operates in a stateless manner, only ascertaining the intents and/or entities associated with a presented input utterance. To increase the accuracy, two language understanding models are trained. One is trained using only input utterances. The second is trained using input utterance-prior dialog context pairs. The prior dialog context is previous intents and/or entities already determined from the utterances in prior turns of the dialog. When input is received, the language understanding model decides whether the input comprises only an utterance or an utterance and prior dialog context. The appropriate trained machine learning model is selected and the intents and/or entities associated with the input determined by the selected machine learning model.