Problems in the design and use of a connected speech understanding system

MYRTILLE II is a connected speech understanding system which is presently designed by our research group in order to recognize a wide subset of spoken French. The syntax accepted by this system is approximately the one of basic French without pronominal references, the vocabulary is presently about 400 words. The application is concerned with a meteorological inquiry system. A first version of MYRTILLE II using a best-first left-to-right strategy is presently operational and has already been tested on a number of sentences. In this paper we present several practical examples illustrating the various choices made in the system and the interactions between processing levels : acoustic-phonetic-lexical decoding, syntactic-semantic analysis, interaction between the recognition and dialog modules, together with several programs which are intended to help in the development and use of this system.