AUTOMATED MEANINGFUL PHRASE CLUSTERING

A system and method for automated task selection is provided where a selected task is identified from the natural speech of the user making the selection. The system and method incorporate the selection of meaningful phrases through the use of a test for significance. The selected meaningful phrases are then clustered. The meaningful phrase clusters are input to a speech recognizer that determines whether any meaningful phrase clusters are present in the input speech. Task-type decisions are then made on the basis of the recognized meaningful phrase clusters.