1. A natural language understanding monitoring system for identifying a particular task that a user wishes to have performed from among a predetermined set of tasks, the natural language understanding monitoring system including at least a speech recognizer, and the natural language understanding monitoring system being adapted to a) conduct an automated dialog with the user, and b) if the system is unable to identify from the automated dialog conducted in (a) any one of the predetermined tasks as being the particular task to at least a predetermined level of confidence, i) make a determination of the value of a probability that further automated dialog will enable the system to identify the particular task, and ii) determine whether or not to conduct further automated dialog with the user, in an attempt to identify the particular task, based on the relative values of the probability determined in (i) and a predetermined threshold value iii) said probability value determination being based on inputs from the user during the automated dialog conducted in (a), wherein at least one of a) and b) are carried out by the system using a programmed processor.