17. A method for processing speech, comprising: identifying an array of conceptual components forming words within an input; generating a set of candidate parts of speech from each word; permuting at least a portion of the candidate parts of speech from each array; producing a plurality of potentially valid syntactic structures from the permuted candidate parts of speech; for a plurality of potentially valid syntactic structures, generating a conceptual representation thereof based on a database of conceptual information comprising parts of speech and a dictionary; determining at least one anomaly criterion for each conceptual representation; disambiguating between at least two potentially valid syntactic structures based on the corresponding conceptual representations, in dependence on the determined at least one anomaly criterion; and producing at least one of an output and a response in dependence on said disambiguating.
22. The method of claim 17 , further comprising associating conceptual rules with each candidate word and each associated part of speech, and each syntactic sequence of words and each associated part of speech, wherein further the conceptual rules relate to conceptual relationships between at least two of the candidate words and syntactic sequences of words.