This paper describes the structure and operation of SOUL, or Semantically-Oriented Understanding of Language. SOUL is a knowledge intensive reasoning system which is opportunistically used to provide a more thorough, fine grained analysis of an input utterance following its processing by a case-frame speech parser. The SOUL postprocessor relies upon extensive semantic and pragmatic knowledge to correct, reject and/or clarify the outputs of the CMU PHOENIX case-frame parser for speech and speech transcripts. We describe briefly both some of the SOUL is a general purpose, in-depth knowledge based reasoning system. It relies primarily upon pragmatic and semantic knowledge which is organized into a multi-layered frame base system of hierarchies. 1 It reasons by using abductive reasoning and constraint satisfaction techniques. The SOUL system is designed to perform thorough analyses of individual, spoken ut-terances. The in-depth reasoning component augments the basic