This book is intended to give an overview of the major results achieved in the field of natural speech understanding inside ESPRIT Project P. 26, "Advanced Algorithms and Architectures for Speech and Image Processing." The project began as a Pilot Project in the early stage of Phase 1 of the ESPRIT Program launched by the Commission of the European Communities. After one year, in the light of the preliminary results that were obtained, it was confirmed for its 5-year duration. Even though the activities were carried out for both speech and image understand ing we preferred to focus the...