Semantic composition process in a spoken language understanding system

A knowledge representation formalism for SLU is introduced. It is used for in- cremental and partially automated annotation of the Media corpus in terms of semantic structures. An automatic interpretation process is described for compos- ing semantic structures from basic semantic constituents using patterns involving constituents and words. The process has procedures for obtaining semantic compo- sitions and for generating frame hypotheses by inference. This process is evaluated on a dialogue corpus manually annotated at the word and semantic constituent levels.