Automatic generation of portable parallel natural language parsers

Since natural language parsing is a computationally intensive task, the parallel parsing of natural language seems a promising choice. This paper describes both the Eu-PAGE (Eurotra PArser GEnerator) meta-compiler for the Eurotra formalism, which is a tool that automatically generates parallel natural language parsers, and the Dialogos parser, which is a parallel parser for the Greek language generated by Eu-PAGE. Parallel parsers generated by Eu-PAGE are based on finite-state machines, employ coarse-grained parallelism and are portably implemented on top of two parallel software platforms: PVM and Orchid. Orchid uses light-weight processes as the basic unit of parallelism, enhanced with advanced operating system facilities. The collected experimental results so far demonstrate satisfactory speed-ups of the parallel implementations compared to the sequential one