This volume presents advanced speech technologies and their applications in the emerging areas of natural language processing, multilingual conversion between speech and text, integration of speech, text, visual information and gesture, and the design of computer workstations with a comfortable speech-based human interface. Multilingual dialogue-oriented applications are also presented, and their importance in the multilingual European environment is emphasized. office modernisation is also addressed together with telecommunication, computer-aided education, and other areas relevant to the processing of speech-based information. The volume contains technical papers presenting advanced experimental results obtained in several projects within the ESPRIT Programma during the last three years.