Embodiments for creating compact example subsets for intent classification in a conversational system are provided. A set of content used for training an intent classifier is received from a conversational corpus. Entries within the set of content are separated into a first subset and a second subset, and a cross-validation operation is performed on the first and second subsets to identify a correctly labeled portion and an incorrectly labeled portion of the set of content. A reduced content used for performing a final training of the intent classifier is formed by combining a first number of the entries from the correctly labeled portion and a second number of the entries from the incorrectly labeled portion of the set of content.