What a Grammar of Spoken Dialogues has to Deal With

The promising results speech recognition achieved in the recent years confront computational linguistics with a new task. The attractivity of speech understanding systems in the market justifies the effort to cope with spoken language computationally. This article is intended to sharpen the awareness of the difficulties that lurk behind the knowledge transfer from text to speech understanding. The comparison of the grammars of spoken and written language, especially the surplus of regular constructions in spoken language are the subject of several linguistic works, reviewed here to set up a sort of syntactic agenda for speech understanding systems. Nothing is said however about the various methods that will help to fulfill this agenda.