2. The text classifier of claim 1 wherein the parser further comprises: a rule-based parser receiving the textual input and the selected class identifier and outputting the semantic representation of the textual input.
1. A computer-readable storage medium including instructions readable by a computer which, when implemented, provide a text classifier in a natural language interface that receives a natural language user input, the text classifier comprising: a feature extractor extracting a binary feature vector of features from a textual input indicative of the natural language user input; a statistical classifier coupled to the feature extractor, receiving the feature vector of features, and outputting a selected class identifier, the selected class identifier identifying a task to be completed, associated with the textual input, based on the features in the feature vector, the statistical classifier comprising: a plurality of statistical classification components each statistical classification component receiving the feature vector and outputting a respective class identifier based on the feature vector, each respective class identifier representing one of a plurality of tasks to be completed that can be identified using each statistical classification component; and a class selector coupled to the plurality of statistical classification components and selecting one of the respective class identifiers as the selected class identifier identifying the task to be completed wherein the class selector comprises one of a group comprising: a voting component that selects a class identifier that is output by more statistical classification components than other class identifiers; and an additional statistical classifier that receives as an input the class identifiers output from the plurality of statistical classification components and that selects one of the class identifiers received in the input; and a parser that receives the selected class identifier and the textual input and generates a semantic representation of the textual input based on the selected class identifier.