The Locality Phenomenon And Parallel Processing Of Natural Language

I. Amon~ the various traditions established in computer processing of natural language during the twenty-odd years of research the understanding thet any such processing is to be done sequentially has a special status. Even the most advanced natural language processing systems employ the sequential mode as a necessary evil, or do not even consider it an evil due to the ostensible lack of alternatives; thus, for instance, such well-known systems as SAM, PAM, ELI /cf. e.g. Schank and Riesbeck, 1981/, PHRAN /cf. e.g. Arens, 1981/ or PARSIFAL /see e.g. Marcus, 1979/ are all based on sequentionslity. The recent advances in the VLSI technology suggest %her a re-evaluation of this tradition is in order. Indeed, non-sequential "parallel ~ methods start emerging. In the field of AI one could mention, for example, Kornfeld's (1979, 1981) work in problem solving or the approach of HEARSAY-II (see Erman et el., 1980) to speech processing. The word parallelism seems even to turn gradually into a current "buzz-word" in the AI community. Note that the meaning of this word still remains largely loose. Thus, Phillips and Hendler (1981) snggest a system of several tss___~k-oriented