A method for ranking candidate speech recognition results includes generating, with a controller, a plurality of feature vectors for the candidate speech recognition results, each feature vector including one or more of trigger pair features, a confidence score feature, and word-level features. The method further includes providing the plurality of feature vectors as inputs to a neural network, generating a plurality of ranking scores corresponding to the plurality of feature vectors for the plurality of candidate speech recognition results based on an output layer of the neural network, and operating the automated system using the candidate speech recognition result in the plurality of candidate speech recognition results corresponding to a highest ranking score in the plurality of ranking scores as input.