Abstract
We report on a series of simulation experiments for a large-scale natural language processing system. The results indicate that an or-parallel, all solutions search provides substantial speed-up (20-30 fold) for this application. Longer sentences show relatively greater speed-up, with parse times that increase linearly with sentence length, given a sufficient number of processors. These results have been obtained using a simple, application-specific model of independent, non-communicating or-parallel processes in a shared memory environment. Simulations run with a range of overhead costs show significant benefits from parallel processing with per-process overheads ranging as high as the median process size; our estimates of overhead times are substantially smaller than median process size.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a revised and expanded version of Hirschman, Hopkins, and Smith, “Or-Parallel Speed- Up in Natural Language Processing: A Case Study,” published in Logic Programming: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference and Symposium, MIT Press, 1988.
This research has been sponsored in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Rome Air Development Center (RADC) of the Air Force Systems Command under contract F30602-86-C-0093 and in part by DARPA under contract N00014-85-C-0012, administered by the Office of Naval Research. The new work reported here has been supported by Unisys Independent Research and Development funds.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Mike Accetta, Robert Baron, William Bolosky, David Golub, Richard Rashid, Avadis Tevanian, and Michael Young, Mach: a new kernel foundation for UNIX development. In Proceedings of Summer Usenit, CMU Computer Science Department Technical Report, July, 1986.
P. Bates and J. Wileden, High-level debugging of distributed systems: The behavioral abstraction approach, Technical Report COINS 83–29, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, Univ. Massachusetts, 1983.
T. Blenko, Compiling Logic Programs to Applicative Form, LBS Technical Memo 74, Paoli Research Center, Unisys Corporation, Paoli, Pennsylvania, January, 1988.
Pin-Yee Chen,, personal communication, August, 1987.
Ciepielewski, S. Haridi, and B. Hausman, Initial Evaluation of a Virtual Machine for OR-Parallel Execution of Logic Programs. Proceedings of IFIP TC-10, U. of Manchester, 1985.
J. S. Conery, Binding Environments for Parallel Logic Programs in Non-Shared Memory Multiprocessors. In Proc. of the 1987 Symposium on Logic Programming, San Francisco, 1987, pp. 457–467.
Terry Disz, Ewing Lusk, and Ross Overbeek, Experiments with Or-Parallel Logic Programs. In Proc. of the Third International Conference on Logic Programming, J. L. Lassez (ed.), Melbourne, 1987, pp. 576–600.
John Dowding and Lynette Hirschman, Dynamic Translation for Rule Pruning in Restriction Grammar. In Proc. of the Second International Conference on Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming, Vancouver, August, 1987.
Encore,Multimax Technical Summary. Encore Computer Corporation, Marlboro, Massachusetts, September 1986.
B. S. Fagin and A. M. Despain, Performance Studies of a Parallel PROLOG Architecture. In Proceedings of the Hth International Symposium on Computer Architecture, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June, 1987, pp. 108–116.
B. Hausman, A. Ciepielewski, and S. Haridi, OR-Parallel Prolog Made Efficient on Shared Memory Multiprocessors. In Proc. of the 1987 Symposium on Logic Programming, San Francisco, 1987, pp. 69–79.
Lynette Hirschman, Martha Palmer, John Dowding, Deborah Dahl, Marcia Linebarger, Rebecca Passonneau, Francois Lang, Catherine Ball, and Carl Weir, The PUNDIT Natural Language Processing System. In Proc. of the Conference on Artificial Intelligence Systems in Government, Washington, D.C., March, 1989, pp. 234–243.
L. Hirschman and K. Puder, Restriction Grammar: A Prolog Implementation. In Logic Programming and its Applications, D.H.D. Warren and M. VanCaneghem (ed.), 1985, pp. 244–261.
L. Hirschman, Conjunction in Meta-Restriction Grammar. J. of Logic Programming 4, 1986, pp. 299–328.
L. Hirschman, A Meta-Treatment of Wh-Constructions in English. In Proc. of META88, Meta-Programming in Logic Programming, Bristol, UK, June, 1988.
W. Hopkins and R. Smith, Concurrency Simulation by Abstract Interpretation, LBS Technical Memo, Paoli Research Center, Unisys Corp., Paoli, Pennsylvania, December, 1987.
F.-M. Lang and L. Hirschman, Improved Parsing Through Interactive Acquisition of Selectional Patterns. In Proc. of the Second Conference on Applied Computational Linguistics, Austin, Texas, February, 1988.
M. Linebarger, D. Dahl, L. Hirschman, and R. Passonneau, Sentence Fragments Regular Structures. In Proc. of the 1988 Annual Conference on Computational Linguistics, Buffalo, New York, June, 1988, pp. 7–16.
T. Moto-oka, H. Tanaka, H. Aida, and T. Maruyama, The Architecture of a Parallel Inference Engine - PIE. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Fifth Generation Computer Systems, 1984, pp. 479–488.
F. C. N. Pereira and D. H. D. Warren, Definite Clause Grammars for Language Analysis -- A Survey of the Formalism and a Comparison with Augmented Transition Networks. Artificial Intelligence 13, 1980, pp. 231–278.
Ehud Shapiro, An Or-Parallel Execution Algorithm for Prolog and its FCP Implementation. In Proc. of the Third International Conference on Logic Programming, J.-L. Lassez (ed.), Melbourne, Australia, 1987, pp. 311–337.
K. Shen and D. H. D. Warren, A Simulation Study of the Ar- gonne Model for Or-Parallel Execution of Prolog. In Proc. of the Third International Conference on Logic Programming, J.-L. Lassez (ed.), Melbourne, Australia, 1987, pp. 54–68.
Y. Sohma, K. Satoh, K. Kumon, H. Masuzawa, and A. Itashiki, A New Parallel Inference Mechanism Based on Sequential Processing, TM-0131, ICOT, 1985.
D. H. D. Warren, The SRI Model for Or-Parallel Execution of Prolog -- Abstract Design and Implementation. In Proc. of the 1987 Symposium on Logic Programming, The Computer Society of the IEEE, San Francisco, 1987, pp. 92–102.
H. Westphal and P. Robert, The PEPSys Model: Combining Backtracking, AND- and OR-Parallelism. In Proc. of the 1987 Symposium on Logic Programming, San Francisco, 1987, pp. 436–448
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1990 Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hopkins, W.C., Hirschman, L., Smith, R.C. (1990). Or-Parallelism in Natural Language Parsing. In: Kumar, V., Gopalakrishnan, P.S., Kanal, L.N. (eds) Parallel Algorithms for Machine Intelligence and Vision. Symbolic Computation. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3390-9_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3390-9_7
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-7994-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-3390-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive