The present disclosure relates to chatbot systems, and more particularly, to techniques for identifying an intent for an utterance based on semantic framing. For an input utterance, a semantic frame is generated. The semantic frame includes semantically relevant grammatical relations and corresponding words identified in the utterance. The semantically relevant grammatical relations define context and relationships of words in the utterance. The semantic frame is used to identify an intent for the utterance, based on an intent model. The intent model maps features to corresponding words for a given intent. The semantic frame is compared to a plurality of intent models, and a best-matching intent model is used to identify the intent for the utterance.