1. A method for identifying an intended addressee by a conversational understanding system executing on a computer processing device, the method comprising: receiving an utterance; extracting prosodic features from speech segments of the received utterance; performing an evaluation of the extracted prosodic features to determine whether the intended addressee is one of a human and a computer, wherein the evaluation is word-independent, context-independent, and speaker-independent; in response to determining that the intended addressee is the computer, processing the utterance to generate a response; and outputting the response through the computer processing device.