USC: description of the SNAP system used for MUC-4

Abstract

The main goal of the SNAP project is to build a massively parallel computer capable of fast and accurate natural language processing [3]. Under NSF funding, a parallel computer was built in the Parallel Knowledge Processing Laboratory at USC and software was developed to operate the machine [2]. The approach in designing SNAP was to find a knowledge representation and a reasoning paradigm useful for natural language processing which exibits massive parallelism. We have selected marker-passing on semantic networks as a way to represent and process linguistic knowledge.