Accelerating the CKY parsing using FPGAs

Abstract

The main contribution of this paper is to present an FPGAbased implementation of an instance-specific hardware which accelerates the CKY (Cook-Kasami-Younger) parsing for context-free grammars. Given a context-free grammar G and a string x, the CKY parsing determines if G derives x. We have developed a hardware generator that creates a Verilog HDL source to perform the CKY parsing for any given context-free grammar G. The created source is embedded in an FPGA using the design software provided by the FPGA vendor. We evaluated the instance-specific hardware, generated by our hardware generator, using a timing analyzer and tested it using the Altera FPGAs. The generated hardware attains a speed-up factor of approximately 750 over the software CKY parsing algorithm. Hence, we believe that our approach is a promising solution for the CKY parsing. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.