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.