Book excerpt: Parallel processing is not only a general topic of interest for computer scientists and researchers in artificial intelligence, but it is gaining more and more attention in the community of scientists studying natural language and its processing (computational linguists, AI researchers, psychologists). The growing need to integrate large divergent bodies of knowledge in natural language processing applications, or the belief that massively parallel systems are the only ones capable of handling the complexities and subtleties of natural language, are just two examples of the reasons for this increasing interest.