This paper describes the first implementation of an NLP module of a prototype spoken language dialogue system for use in Danish flight reservations. In order to handle spontaneous spoken input, the module parses robustly and allows a combination of word-spotting and a semantic analysis based on syntactic structures. The semantic analysis is accomplished via rules mapping from syntactic structures to semantic interpretations that are used as slot-fillers in frame-like semantic objects. The module will soon be augmented to integrate phrase-spotting and pattern-matching, with the grammar-writer maintaining full control over the level of integration of the these approaches via the lexicon, syntactic grammars and semantic mapping rules.

Keywords: syntactic parsing, semantic mapping, flexible approach