A dialog system, comprising: a knowledge base that stores information regarding a device and a domain, and is adapted to categorize the information in at least one of a relational and an ontological manner; a device/application manager adapted to isolate the device information from a dialog management module and encapsulate the device information for a plug-n-play of the domain; a speech recognition module adapted to receive speech from a user and convert the speech into a word sequence, and to recognize at least one of full and partial proper names; a natural language understanding module adapted to identify meaning structures from the word sequence using a statistically dependent model of the domain, and adapted to adjust a boundary of the at least one of the full and partial proper names; the dialogue management module adapted to interpret the meaning structures in a context of the conversation using the device information, and to construct a content of a response; a response generation module adapted to select content and generate the response based on the context and grammatical rules; and a speech synthesis module adapted to synthesize speech wave forms for the response, characterized in that the dialogue management module is adapted to support a multi-domain environment, wherein different application domains involve specifying a different grammar for surface-level generation, and a device-specific Activity Model, which represents tasks being managed by the dialogue management module and their status so that an explicit reference to the task is provided, wherein the Activity Model is a declarative specification of the capabilities of the agent or device with which the dialogue management module interfaces, and includes linguistic information, such as mappings from verbs and their arguments to device-actions. a knowledge base that stores information regarding a device and a domain, and is adapted to categorize the information in at least one of a relational and an ontological manner; a device/application manager adapted to isolate the device information from a dialog management module and encapsulate the device information for a plug-n-play of the domain; a speech recognition module adapted to receive speech from a user and convert the speech into a word sequence, and to recognize at least one of full and partial proper names; a natural language understanding module adapted to identify meaning structures from the word sequence using a statistically dependent model of the domain, and adapted to adjust a boundary of the at least one of the full and partial proper names; the dialogue management module adapted to interpret the meaning structures in a context of the conversation using the device information, and to construct a content of a response; a response generation module adapted to select content and generate the response based on the context and grammatical rules; and a speech synthesis module adapted to synthesize speech wave forms for the response, characterized in that the dialogue management module is adapted to support a multi-domain environment, wherein different application domains involve specifying a different grammar for surface-level generation, and a device-specific Activity Model, which represents tasks being managed by the dialogue management module and their status so that an explicit reference to the task is provided, wherein the Activity Model is a declarative specification of the capabilities of the agent or device with which the dialogue management module interfaces, and includes linguistic information, such as mappings from verbs and their arguments to device-actions.