Most information systems that deal with natural language texts do not tolerate much
deviation from their idealized and simplified model of language. Spoken dialog is notoriously
ungrammatical, however. Because the MAREDI project focuses in particular on the automatic
analysis of scripted dialogs, we needed to develop a robust capacity to analyze transcribed
spoken language. This paper summarizes the current state of our work. It presents the main
elements of our approach, which is based on exploiting surface markers as the best route to the
semantics of the conversation modelled. We highlight the foundations of our particular
conversational model, and give an overview of the MAREDI system. We then discuss its three key
modules, a connectionist network to recognise speech acts, a robust syntactic analyzer, and a
semantic analyzer.