We propose a novel zero-shot learning method for semantic utterance
classification (SUC). It learns a classifier f:X→Y for problems where
none of the semantic categories Y are present in the training set. The
framework uncovers the link between categories and utterances using a semantic
space. We show that this semantic space can be learned by deep neural networks
trained on large amounts of search engine query log data. More precisely, we
propose a novel method that can learn discriminative semantic features without
supervision. It uses the zero-shot learning framework to guide the learning of
the semantic features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the zero-shot
semantic learning algorithm on the SUC dataset collected by (Tur, 2012).
Furthermore, we achieve state-of-the-art results by combining the semantic
features with a supervised method