1. A spoken language understanding method, the method causing a computing device to perform steps comprising: semantically parsing, via a processor of the computing device, a received utterance from a user by semantic role labeling to generate at least one semantic role label for only head words of phrases in the received utterance; extracting a predicate from the semantically parsed utterance; identifying a syntactic path between head words and their respective extracted predicate; estimating an intent of the user based on the extracted predicate and based on predicate/argument pairs, each predicate argument pair comprising a predicate verb and an argument which completes the predicate verb; and responding to the received utterance based on the estimated intent.