Frame based interpretation of conversational speech

Two approaches to Spoken Language Understanding based on frames describing chunked knowledge are described. They are applied to the MEDIA corpus annotated in terms of concepts expressing chunks of spoken sentences. General rules of knowledge composition and inference appear to be adequate to effectively applying the application ontology for obtaining frame based representations of dialogue turns. The main difficulty appears to be the characterization of the syntactic knowledge expressing semantic links between knowledge chunks. This knowledge can be hand-crafted or automatically learned from examples. It is shown that the latter approach outperforms the former if applied to ASR error prone transcriptions.