It is with great pleasure that I present this third volume of the series
"Advanced Applications in Pattern Recognition." It represents the
summary of many man- (and woman-) years of effort in the field of speech
recognition by tne author's former team at the University of Turin. It
combines the best results in fuzzy-set theory and artificial
intelligence to point the way to definitive solutions to the
speech-recognition problem. It is my hope that it will become a classic
work in this field. I take this opportunity to extend my thanks and
appreciation to Sy Marchand, Plenum's Senior Editor responsible for
overseeing this series, and to Susan Lee and Jo Winton, who had the
monumental task of preparing the camera-ready master sheets for
publication. Morton Nadler General Editor vii PREFACE Si parva licet
componere magnis Virgil, Georgics, 4,176 (37-30 B.C.) The work reported
in this book results from years of research oriented toward the goal of
making an experimental model capable of understanding spoken sentences
of a natural language. This is, of course, a modest attempt compared to
the complexity of the functions performed by the human brain. A method
is introduced for conce1v1ng modules performing perceptual tasks and for
combining them in a speech understanding system.