This book is a collection of papers which describe the work of the Speech and Language Processing Division at British Telecom"s Research Laboratories (BTRL) in Suffolk, England. The purpose of this Division is to develop technology appropriate to BT"s telecommunications networks and peripheral businesses. The projects being developed range from the short-term development of speech-interactive products to long-term studies of human/machine interaction via natural language. The papers selected for this volume are intended to provide a representative sample of work of the Division in progress during 1988 and 1989. However the work on commercially sensitive applications has been omitted for reasons of confidentiality.