A Streaming Dataflow Implementation of Parallel Cocke–Younger–Kasami Parser

Abstract

Abstract Parsing is the task of analyzing grammatical structures of an input sentence and deriving its parse tree. Efficient solutions for parsing are needed in many applications such as natural language processing, bioinformatics, and pattern recognition. The Cocke–Younger–Kasami (CYK) algorithm is a well-known parsing algorithm that operates on context-free grammars in Chomsky normal form and has been extensively studied for execution on parallel machines. In this chapter, we analyze the parallelizing opportunities for the CYK algorithm and give an overview of existing implementations on different hardware architectures. We propose a novel, efficient streaming dataflow implementation of the CYK algorithm on reconfigurable hardware (Maxeler dataflow engines), which achieves 18–76 × speedup over an optimized sequential implementation for real-life grammars for natural language processing, depending on the length of the input string.