This volume contains invited and contributed papers presented at the NATO Advanced Study Institute on "Recent Advances in Speech Understanding and Dialog Systems" held in Bad Windsheim, FRG, July 5 to - 18, 1987. The subject of the book is a treatment of theoretical foundations and experimental results relevant for speech understanding and dialog systems. It becomes evident that signal processing and linguistic processing must be and can be combined in advanced speech understanding systems. Relevant topics ranging from speech segmentation and coding to knowledge-based understanding and dialog techniques are treated in depth in invited papers authored by internationally renowned researchers. Additional material is provided in contributed papers from leading experts in the field. The material of the book is organized in three parts, Speech Coding and Segmentation, Word Recognition, and Linguistic Processing. Topics covered are isolated word and continuous speech recognition, vector quantization, speaker independence, prosodic analyses of speech, hidden Markov models, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analysis of speech, the integration of linguistic knowledge into speech understanding, and dialog strategies. Possible applications are discussed in various papers.