  Decoding speaker's intent is a crucial part of spoken language understanding
(SLU). The presence of noise or errors in the text transcriptions, in real life
scenarios make the task more challenging. In this paper, we address the spoken
language intent detection under noisy conditions imposed by automatic speech
recognition (ASR) systems. We propose to employ confusion2vec word feature
representation to compensate for the errors made by ASR and to increase the
robustness of the SLU system. The confusion2vec, motivated from human speech
production and perception, models acoustic relationships between words in
addition to the semantic and syntactic relations of words in human language. We
hypothesize that ASR often makes errors relating to acoustically similar words,
and the confusion2vec with inherent model of acoustic relationships between
words is able to compensate for the errors. We demonstrate through experiments
on the ATIS benchmark dataset, the robustness of the proposed model to achieve
state-of-the-art results under noisy ASR conditions. Our system reduces
classification error rate (CER) by 20.84% and improves robustness by 37.48%
(lower CER degradation) relative to the previous state-of-the-art going from
clean to noisy transcripts. Improvements are also demonstrated when training
the intent detection models on noisy transcripts.
