1. A method comprising: receiving, during a natural language dialog between a user and a computing device, an utterance; generating, via the computing device, a semantic and syntactic graph using the utterance, the semantic and syntactic graph comprising an initial state and a final state associated with the utterance and being generated by adding transitions that encode semantic and syntactic categories of words or word sequences within the utterance; extracting possible combinations of features from the semantic and syntactic graph, to yield extracted n-grams; comparing the extracted n-grams to previously classified n-grams, to yield a comparison; classifying, via the computing device, the utterance as being associated with a call type based on the extracted n-grams and the comparison, wherein the call type is chosen from a predefined set of call types and wherein the call type characterizes a communication, to yield a classified utterance; and responding, via the computing device and with a computer-generated response, to the user in the natural language dialog based on the classified utterance.
4. The method of claim 1 , wherein the semantic and syntactic graph further comprises one of speech tags and a syntactic parse of the utterance.