A system and a method to generate statistical utterance classifiers optimized for the individual states of a spoken dialog system is disclosed. The system and method make use of large databases of transcribed and annotated utterances from calls collected in a dialog system in production and log data reporting the association between the state of the system at the moment when the utterances were recorded and the utterance. From the system state, being a vector of multiple system variables, subsets of these variables, certain variable ranges, quantized variable values, etc. can be extracted to produce a multitude of distinct utterance subsets matching every possible system state. For each of these subset and variable combinations, statistical classifiers can be trained, tuned, and tested, and the classifiers can be stored together with the performance results and the state subset and variable combination. Once the set of classifiers and stored results have been put into a production system, for a given system state, the classifiers resulting in optimum performance can be selected from the result list and used to perform utterance classification.