The present teaching relates to facilitating a guided dialog with a user. In one example, an input utterance is obtained from the user. One or more task sets are estimated based on the input utterance. Each of the one or more task sets includes a plurality of tasks estimated to be requested by the user via the input utterance and is associated with a confidence score computed based on statistics with respect to the plurality of tasks in the task set. At least one of the one or more task sets is selected based on their respective confidence scores. A response is generated based on the tasks in the selected at least one task set. The response is provided to the user.