15. An apparatus comprising: a processor; and storage for storing data and a plurality of instructions for the processor, wherein the apparatus is configured to execute the plurality of instructions to control the processor to: semantically parse a received utterance by semantic role labeling to generate at least one semantic role label for only head words of phrases in the received utterance; extract a predicate from the semantically parsed utterance, identify a syntactic path between head words and their respective extracted predicate, and estimate an intent 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.
15. An apparatus comprising: a processor; and storage for storing data and a plurality of instructions for the processor, wherein the apparatus is configured to execute the plurality of instructions to control the processor to: semantically parse a received utterance by semantic role labeling to generate at least one semantic role label for only head words of phrases in the received utterance; extract a predicate from the semantically parsed utterance, identify a syntactic path between head words and their respective extracted predicate, and estimate an intent 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. 16. The apparatus of claim 15 , wherein the apparatus is further configured to: syntactically preprocess the utterance before semantically parsing the utterance by semantic role labeling.