8. The system of claim 1 wherein at least one of the components of the system includes a separate module that can be incorporated into a spoken dialog system.
1. A spoken dialog system, comprising: a computer including a processor, and memory, including: a signal input for receiving an audio input; a speech recognition engine; a data store comprising a set of semantic classifiers; a data store for a plurality of utterances received via the audio input; a data store for storing annotated utterances, the annotated utterances being provided from a source language spoken dialog system; a semantic classifier component including a semantic classifier program for, when executed by the processor, mapping the utterances to a set of semantic classes; and a data store for storing a plurality of machine-translated transcriptions, wherein a machine translation component translated utterances transcribed in a source language from a source language spoken dialog system into machine-translated transcriptions for a target language, wherein the semantic classifier program maps unaltered source language annotations to respective translated utterances; and a training component for training one of a set of semantic classifiers to localize the spoken dialog system using the machine-translated transcriptions and the unaltered source language annotations.