LATE Ain'T Earley: A Faster Parallel Earley Parser
This work addresses the need for faster parsing in natural language processing and computational linguistics, representing a strong incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackled the problem of parallelizing the Earley algorithm for parsing context-free grammars, which is difficult due to task dependencies, by introducing the LATE algorithm that allows asynchronous processing, achieving a 120x speedup on a natural language task.
We present the LATE algorithm, an asynchronous variant of the Earley algorithm for parsing context-free grammars. The Earley algorithm is naturally task-based, but is difficult to parallelize because of dependencies between the tasks. We present the LATE algorithm, which uses additional data structures to maintain information about the state of the parse so that work items may be processed in any order. This property allows the LATE algorithm to be sped up using task parallelism. We show that the LATE algorithm can achieve a 120x speedup over the Earley algorithm on a natural language task.