A system and method are disclosed that improve automatic speech recognition in a spoken dialog system. The method comprises partitioning speech recognizer output into self-contained clauses, identifying a dialog act in each of the self-contained clauses, qualifying dialog acts by identifying a current domain object and/or a current domain action, and determining whether further qualification is possible for the current domain object and/or current domain action. If further qualification is possible, then the method comprises identifying another domain action and/or another domain object associated with the current domain object and/or current domain action, reassigning the another domain action and/or another domain object as the current domain action and/or current domain object and then recursively qualifying the new current domain action and/or current object. This process continues until nothing is left to qualify.