This investigation of a computer based language processing formalism will focus on characteristics that facilitate the implementation of linguistic models. It should not only be possible to embed such models in the system concisely, but the resulting system should be computationally efficient. In order to achieve the form of the restrictions determined by the requirement that it be suitable for expressing natural language models. In earlier work, the investigator identified several features common to a range of constrained grammar formalisms, despite their very different notations. These features concern restrictions of the form of the derivation process, and appear to indicate that each of these formalisms is amenable to efficient parallel parsing algorithms. The research will now formalize the common features of these systems and of their processing implications, using results from research on parallel models of computation. This should lead to a deeper understanding of the desirable computational properties inherent in theories developed by computational linguistics.
