The analysis of natural language in the context of keyboard-driven dialogue systems is the central issue addressed in this paper. A module that corrects typing errors, performs domain-specific morphological analysis is developed. A parser for typed unification grammars is designed and implemented in C++; for description of the lexicon and the grammer a specialised specification language is developed. It is argued that typed unification grammars and especially the newly developed specification language are convenient formalisms for describing natural language use in dialogue systems. Research on these issues is carried out in the context of the SCHISMA project, a research project in linguistic engineering; participants in SCHISMA are KPN Research and the University of Twente.

A connectionist network is defined that parses a grammar in Chomsky Normal Form in logarithmic time, based on a modification of Rytter’s recognition algorithm. A similar parsing network can be defined for an arbitrary context-free grammar. Such networks can be integrated into a connectionist parsing environment for interactive distributed processing of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information.

We present a concise survey of approaches to the context-free parsing problem of natural languages in parallel environments. The discussion includes parsing schemes which use more than one traditional parser, schemes where separate processes are assigned to the ‘non-deterministic’ choices during parsing, schemes where the number of processes depends on the length of the sentence being parsed, and schemes where the number of processes depends on the grammar size rather than on the input length. In addition we discuss a connectionist approach to the parsing problem.