1. A method comprising: partitioning, via a processor, a recognizer output associated with a spoken utterance into independent clauses; identifying a dialog act from a hierarchical dialog act taxonomy for each of the independent clauses, wherein the hierarchical dialog act taxonomy comprises a tree structure, wherein the dialog act is a domain-independent dialog act; identifying at least one of an object and an action within each of the independent clauses, wherein the object is a domain-dependent object and the action is a domain-dependent action; qualifying the dialog act with a corresponding one of the object and the action within a respective independent clause to generate a semantic representation, wherein qualifying the dialog act comprises recursively extending the semantic representation by qualifying at least one of the domain-dependent object and the domain-dependent action in each of the independent clauses until nothing is left to qualify; and transmitting the semantic representation to a dialog manager for use in a dialog management application.