Techniques, an apparatus and an article of manufacture identifying one or more utterances that are likely to carry the intent of a speaker, from a conversation between two or more parties. A method includes obtaining an input of a set of utterances in chronological order from a conversation between two or more parties, computing an intent confidence value of each utterance by summing intent confidence scores from each of the constituent words of the utterance, wherein intent confidence scores capture each word's influence on the subsequent utterances in the conversation based on (i) the uniqueness of the word in the conversation and (ii) the number of times the word subsequently occurs in the conversation, and generating a ranked order of the utterances from highest to lowest intent confidence value, wherein the highest intent value corresponds to the utterance which is most likely to carry intent of the speaker.