Neutrino masses and family symmetries

The hypothesis of an additional Abelian symmetry acting in a different way on the three families of leptons leads to interesting predictions in the neutrino-sector. Contrary to what happens in most seesaw models, the structures of the Dirac and the Majorana matrices are determined without any Ansatz, and the order of magnitude of the neutrino masses and mixing angles are fixed once the lepton charges under the family symmetry have been chosen. Two explicit models illustrating this idea are presented. (author)