A novel approach to the problem of text understanding is presented, which exploits a distributed processing concept, where knowledge from different sources comes into play in the course of comprehension. In the paper the rationale of advocating such an approach and in following it are discussed. A prototype parser based on an original distributed problem-solving architecture is presented. It encompasses a centralized declarative control module and a collection of decentralized, loosely coupled, heterogeneous problem solvers specialized in the vadous facets of the parsing task. .
