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<Paper uid="P01-1065">
  <Title>A Generic Approach to Parallel Chart Parsing with an Application to LinGO</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The increasing demand for accuracy and robustness for today's uni cation-based grammar parsers brings on an increasing demand for computing power. In addition, as these systems are increasingly used in applications that require direct user interaction, e.g. web-based applications, responsiveness is of major concern. In the mean time, small-scale desk-top multiprocessor systems (e.g. dual or even quad Pentium machines) are becoming more commonplace and a ordable. In this paper we will show that exploiting the capabilities of these machines can speed up parsers considerably, and can be of major importance in achieving the required performance.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> There are certain requirements the design of a parallel parser should meet. Over the past years, many improvements to existing parsing techniques have boosted the performance of parsers by many factors (Oepen and Callmeier, 2000). If a design of a parallel parser is tied too much to a particular approach to parsing, it may be hard to incorporate such improvements as they become available. For this reason, a solution to parallel parsing should be as general as possible. One obvious way to ensure that optimizations for sequential parsers can be used in a parallel parser as well is to let a parallel parser mimic a sequential parser as much as possible. This is basically the approach we will take.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The parser that we will present in this paper uses the LinGO grammar. LinGO is an HPSG-based grammar which was developed at Stanford (Copestake, 2000). It is currently used by many research institutions. This allows our results to be compared with that of other research groups.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In Section 2, we explore the possibilities for parallelism in natural language parsing by analyzing the computational structure of parsings. Section 3 and 4 discuss respectively the design and the performance of our system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Finally, we compare our work with other research on parallel parsing.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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