---
title: "A Parallel Parser for Spoken Natural Language"
authors:
  - "Egidio P. Giachin"
  - "Claudio Rullent"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1989/245"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1989/0245.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Eleventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1989
pages: "1537-1541"
track: "Speech and Natural Language"
keywords:
---

# A Parallel Parser for Spoken Natural Language

Egidio P. Giachin, Claudio Rullent

*Proceedings of the Eleventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1537-1541.

## Abstract

This paper describes SYNAPSIS, a parser for performing real-time understanding of spoken utterances in a parallel computational environment. Understanding continuous speech allowing reasonably free syntax poses two main problems, namely the risk of erroneous interpretations and the largeness of the search space owing to the high uncertainty of the input. The parser is characterized by an approach whose major novel features are 1) a drastic reduction of idle time, thanks to the asynchronous interagent communications, and 2) high modularity, thanks to the distribution of homogeneous pieces of knowledge rather than distribution of different parsing tasks. These features make the parser most apt for implementation on homogeneous Transputer-based distributed architectures.