This paper describes, from a system architectural viewpoint, how knowledge-based technologies have been utilized in developing EXLOG (an LSI circuit synthesis system) and SOFTEX (a software synthesis system) inside the authors' projects. Although the system architectures for EXLOG and SOFTEX started from the same production systems, consisting of transformation rules in the middle of the 1980's, both branched off in different directions in the 1990's. Based on experiences with EXLOG and SOFTEX, the differences between LSI and software design models are discussed, and the future directions are indicated for the knowledge-based design system architectures.

Recent investigations using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of human speech organs have opened up new avenues of research. Visualization of the speech production system provides abundant information on the physiological and acoustic realization of human speech. This article summarizes the current status of MRI applications with respect to speech research as well as our own experience of discovery and re-evaluation of acoustic events emanating from the vocal tract and physiological mechanisms.

The main contribution of this paper is to present an efficient GPU implementation of bulk computation of the CKY parsing for a context-free grammar, which determines if a context-free grammar derives each of a lot of input strings. The bulk computation is to execute the same algorithm for a lot of inputs in turn or at the same time. The CKY parsing is to determine if a context-free grammar derives a given string. We show that the bulk computation of the CKY parsing can be implemented in the GPU efficiently using Bitwise Parallel Bulk Computation (BPBC) technique. We also show the rule minimization technique and the dynamic scheduling method for further acceleration of the CKY parsing on the GPU. The experimental results using NVIDIA TITAN X GPU show that our implementation of the bitwise-parallel CKY parsing for strings of length 32 takes 395µs per string with 131072 production rules for 512 non-terminal symbols.