A method for authoring a conversational bot including: receiving conversation data; receiving seed intent data that comprises seed intents having a seed intent label and sample intent-bearing utterances; using an intent mining algorithm to mine the conversation data to determine new utterances to associate with the seed intent; augmenting the seed intent data to include the mined new utterances associated with the seed intents; and uploading the augmented seed intent data into the conversation bot. The intent mining algorithm may include: identifying intent-bearing utterances; identifying candidate intents; for each of the seed intents, identifying seed intent alternatives from the sample intent-bearing utterances; associating the intent-bearing utterances from the conversation data with the seed intents via determining a degree of semantic similarity between the candidate intents of the intent-bearing utterances and the seed intent alternatives.