Logical Approach to Natural Language Understanding in a Spoken Dialogue System

We present a logical approach of spoken language understanding for a human-machine dialogue system. The aim of the analysis is to provide a logical formula, or a conceptual graph, by assembling concepts related to a delimited application domain. This flexible structure is gradually built during an incremental parsing, which is meant to combine syntactic and semantic criteria. Then, a contextual understanding step leads to completing this structure. The evaluations of the current system are encouraging. This approach is a preliminary for a logical dialogue that uses the form of the semantic representations.