A judicial systems laboratory has been established and several large-scale information management systems projects have been undertaken within the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C. The newness of the court application area, together with the experimental nature of the initial prototypes, required that the system building tools be as flexible and efficient as possible for effective software design and development. The size of the databases, the expected transaction volumes, and the long-term value of the court records required a data manipulation system capable of providing high performance and integrity. The resulting design criteria, the programming capabilities developed, and their use in system construction are described herein. This database programming facility has been especially designed as a technical management tool for the database administrator, while providing the applications programmer with a flexible database software interface for high productivity. Specifically, a network-type database management system using SAIL as the data manipulation host language is described. Generic data manipulation verb formats using SAIL's macro facilities and dynamic data structuring facilities allowing in-core database representations have been developed to achieve a level of flexibility not usually attained in conventional database systems.

The Hearsay II speech-understanding system (HSII) (Lesser et al [11], Fennell [9], and Erman and Lesser [6]) is an implementation of a knowledge-based multiprocessing artificial intelligence (AI) problem-solving organization. HSII is intended to represent a problem-solving organization which is applicable for implementation in a parallel hardware environment such as C.mmp (Bell et al [2]). The primary characteristics of this organization include: 1) multiple, diverse, independent and asynchronously executing knowledge sources (KS's), 2) cooperating (in terms of control) via a generalized form of the hypothesize-and-test paradigm involving the data-directed invocation of KS processes, and 3) communicating (in terms of data) via a shared blackboard-like data base in which the current data state is held in a homogeneous, multidimensional, directed-graph structure. The object of this paper is to explore several of the ramifications of such a problem-solving organization by examining the mechanisms and policies underlying HSII which are necessary for supporting its organization as a multiprocessing system. In addition, a multiprocessor simulation study is presented which details the effects of actually implementing such a parallel organization for use in a particular application area, that of speech understanding.

This paper considers various factors affecting system em organization for speech understanding research. The structure of the Hearsay system based on a set of cooperating, independent processes using the hypothesize-and-test paradigm is presented. Design considerations for the effective use of multiprocessor and network achitectures in speech understanding systems ems are presented: control of processes, interprocess communication and data sharing, resource allocation, and debugging are discussed.1

This paper describes the structure and operation of the Hearsay-I1speech understanding system by the use of a specific example illustrating the various stages of recognition. The system consists of a set of cooperating independent processes, each representing a source of knowledge. The knowledge is used either to predict what may appear in a given context or to verify hypotheses resulting from a prediction. The structure of the system is illustrated by considering its operation in a particular task situation: Voice-Chess. The representation and use of various sources of knowledge are outlined. Preliminary results of the reduction in search resulting from the use of various sources of knowledge are given.