annotation

Intent Classification

Labeling the underlying goal behind a user's text or voice request.

Intent classification assigns a request to the goal behind it rather than its literal wording — "what's the weather going to be like this weekend" and "will I need an umbrella Saturday" might both map to the same "get_weather_forecast" intent despite sharing almost no words.

This task underpins conversational assistants and voice systems: once intent is identified, a separate slot-filling step extracts the specific parameters (date, location) needed to fulfill it.

The hard part of intent classification is usually taxonomy design rather than the labeling itself — overlapping or ambiguous intent categories create the same kind of ambiguity problems seen in any other classification task.

What this means for trainers

Pay attention to what the user is actually trying to accomplish, not the keywords they used — literal keyword matching is the most common mistake in this task type.