This document describes a dissertation focused on developing spoken dialogue systems through unsupervised learning techniques. The dissertation contributes methods for knowledge acquisition and spoken language understanding modeling. For knowledge acquisition, it presents techniques for ontology induction, structure learning, and surface form derivation to automatically induce and organize domain-specific concepts from unlabeled conversations. For spoken language understanding modeling, it introduces methods for semantic decoding and intent prediction to understand utterance semantics and user intents using the acquired knowledge. The dissertation evaluates these techniques on multiple domains and datasets.
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