SHTQS is an intelligent telephonebased spoken dialogue system providing the information about the best route between two sites in Shanghai. Instead of separated parts of speech decoding and language parsing, a close cooperation is carried out in SHTQS by integrating automatic speech recognizer (ASR), language understanding, dialogue management and speech generator. In such a way, the erroneous analysis and uncertainty happening in the preceding stages would be recovered and determined accurately with highlevel knowledge. Moreover, instead of shallow wordlevel analysis or simply keyword or key phrase matching, a deeper analysis is performed in our system by integrating a robust parser and a semantic interpreter. The robust parser is particularly important for spontaneous speech inputs because most of the inquiry sentences/phrases are illformed. In addition, in designing a mixedinitiative dialogue system, understanding users’ inquiries is essential; however, simply matching SHTQS is an intelligent telephonebased spoken dialogue system providing the information about the best route between two sites in Shanghai. Instead of separated parts of speech decoding and language parsing, a close cooperation is carried out in SHTQS by integrating automatic speech recognizer (ASR), language understanding, dialogue management and speech generator. In such a way, the erroneous analysis and uncertainty happening in the previous stages would be recovered and determined happen with the highlevel knowledge. Furthermore, instead of shallow wordlevel analysis or simply keyword or key phrase matching, deeper The analysis is performed in our system by integrating a robust parser and a semantic interpreter. The robust parser is particularly important for spontaneous speech inputs because most of the inquiry sentences / phrases are illformed. In addition, in designing a mixed initiative dialogue system, understanding users’ inquiries is essential; however, simply matching