Semantic composition process in a speech understanding system

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