The book collects the contributions to the NATO Advanced Study Institute on "Speech Recognition and Understanding: Recent Advances, Trends and Applications", held in Cetraro, Italy, during the first two weeks of July 1990. This Institute focused on three topics that are considered of particular interest and rich of i'p.novation by researchers in the fields of speech recognition and understanding: Advances in Hidden Markov modeling, connectionist approaches to speech and language modeling, and linguistic processing including language and dialogue modeling. The purpose of any ASI is that of encouraging scientific communications between researchers of NATO countries through advanced tutorials and presentations: excellent tutorials were offered by invited speakers that present in this book 15 papers which sum­ marize or detail the topics covered in their lectures. The lectures were complemented by discussions, panel sections and by the presentation of related works carried on by some of the attending researchers: these presentations have been collected in 42 short contributions to the Proceedings. This volume, that the reader can find useful for an overview, although incomplete, of the state of the art in speech understanding, is divided into 6 Parts.