This paper describes a new hardware algorithm for morpheme extraction and its implementation on a specific machine (MEX-I), as the first step toward achieving natural language parsing accelerators. It also shows the machine's performance, 100-1,000 times faster than a personal computer. This machine can extract morphemes from 10,000 character Japanese text by searching an 80,000 morpheme dictionary in I second. It can treat multiple text streams, which are composed of character candidates, as well as one text stream. The algorithm is implemented on the machine in linear time for the number of candidates, while conventional sequential algorithms are implemented.
