1. A general-purpose apparatus for natural language understanding (NLU) capable of transforming a source text into a target representation of end terms comprising: a source parser, configured to analyze the source text and generate a semantically-interpretable syntactic representation (SISR) of the source text. a knowledge base searcher, configured to analyze the SISR of the source text and generate a SISR of facts encoded in a knowledge base relevant to the SISR of the source text; and a clause mapping apparatus, configured to receive the SISR of the source text and the SISR of facts encoded in the knowledge base relevant to the SISR of the source text and generate the target representation.