Lexicon access on parallel machines

To communicate with a computer in spoken language is an unattained challenge of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computational Linguistics. To solve such problems linguistic knowledge has to be combined with programming methods of AI and modern computer architectures. We will show how the complexity of linguistic processes can be handled by taking advantage of parallel architectures. In particular, speech systems where most lexicon queries are extremely underspecified suffer from the problem that the access to the lexicon module turns out to be a bottleneck. We introduce the search problem over a given lexicon and compute its time complexity for two different encodings. With the help of a space consuming encoding we define a total order over a lexicon, and, having a total order, logarithmic time becomes valid for the complexity of sequential lexicon search. Next, we will speed up the search by parallelisation, making use of the paracomputer. Last, we describe a practical approach to the parallelisation of a lexicon module with the aim to maximize the throughput. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RR 5221(10)+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Forschung und Technologie (BMFT), Bonn (Germany)DEGerman