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Package edu.stanford.nlp.trees.tregex.tsurgeon

A package for performing transformations of trees to be used in conjunction with edu.stanford.nlp.trees.tregex.

See: Description

Package edu.stanford.nlp.trees.tregex.tsurgeon Description

A package for performing transformations of trees to be used in conjunction with edu.stanford.nlp.trees.tregex. Look at the description below and the class comments for Tsurgeon for more information.

Operations are applied while their pattern match. You must be careful to ensure that patterns do not continue to match after they have been applied, or else Tsurgeon will go into an infinite loop.

Description of operations:

 delete name_1 name_2 ... name_m

   For each name_i, deletes the node it names and everything below it.

 prune name_1 name_2 ... name_m

   For each name_i, prunes out the node it names.  Pruning differs from
   deletion in that if pruning a node causes its parent to have no
   children, then the parent is in turn pruned too.

 excise name1 name2

   The name1 node should either dominate or be the same as the name2
   node.  This excises out everything from name1 to name2.  All the
   children of name2 go into the parent of name1, where name1 was.

 relabel name new-label

   Relabels the node to have the new label. There are three possible forms
   for the new-label:

   relabel nodeX VP - for changing a node label to an alphanumeric
   string

   relabel nodeX /''/ - for relabeling a node to something that
   isn't a valid identifier without quoting, and relabel nodeX

   /^VB(.*)$/verb\/$1/ - for regular expression based relabeling. In the
   last case, all matches of the regular expression against the node
   label are replaced with the replacement String. This has the semantics
   of Java/Perl's replaceAll: you may use capturing groups and put them
   in replacements with $n. Also, as in the example, you can escape a
   slash in the middle of the second and third forms with \/ and \\.
   This last version lets you make a new label that is an arbitrary
   String function of the original label and additional characters that
   you supply.

 relabel name new-label

   Renames the node to have the new label.  If the new-label is not
   a valid tregex identifier, you can quote it by surrounding it by
   pipe characters (|new-label|).

 relabel name regex groupNumber

   matches the regex against the node's current label, and then renames
   the node to have a label that corresponds to the n-th group of the
   regex.

 insert name position
 insert tree position

   inserts the named node, or a manually specified tree (see below for
   syntax), into the position specified.  Right now the only ways to
   specify position are:

   $+ name     to insert the left sister of the named node
   $- name     to insert  the right sister of the named node
   >i name     the i_th daughter of the named node.
   >-i name    the i_th daughter, counting from the right, of the named node.

 move name position

   moves the named node into the specified position.  To be precise, it
   deletes (*NOT* prunes) the node from the tree, and re-inserts it
   into the specified position.

 replace name1 name2

   deletes name1 and inserts a copy of name2 in its place.

 adjoin tree target-node

   adjoins the specified auxiliary tree (see below for syntax) into the
   target node specified.  The daughters of the target node will become
   the daughters of the foot of the auxiliary tree.

 adjoinH tree target-node

   similar to adjoin, but preserves the target node and makes it the root
   of tree

 adjoinF tree target-node

   similar to adjoin, but preserves the target node and makes it the foot
   of tree.  It thus retains its status as parent of its children, placed
   in the appropriate spot in tree.

 coindex name_1 name_2 ... name_m

   Puts a (Penn Treebank style) coindexation suffix of the form "-N" on
   each of nodes name_1 through name_m.  The value of N will be
   automatically generated in reference to the existing coindexations
   in the tree, so that there is never an accidental clash of
   indices across things that are not meant to be coindexed.

Comments:

For all lines after the first line of the file, the character % introduces a comment that extends to the end of the line. All other intended uses of % must be escaped as \% .

Syntax for trees to be inserted or adjoined:

A tree to be adjoined in can be specified with LISP-like parenthetical-bracketing tree syntax such as those used for the Penn Treebank. For example, for the NP "the dog" to be inserted you might use the syntax:

(NP (Det the) (N dog))

That's all that there is for a tree to be inserted. Auxiliary trees (a la Tree Adjoining Grammar) must also have exactly one frontier node ending in the character "@", which marks it as the "foot" node for adjunction. Final instances of the character "@" in terminal node labels will be removed from the actual label of the tree.

For example, if you wanted to adjoin the adverb "breathlessly" into a VP, you might specify the following auxiliary tree:

(VP (Adv breathlessly) VP@ )

All other instances of "@" in terminal nodes must be escaped (i.e., appear as \@); this escaping will be removed by Tsurgeon.

In addition, any node of a tree can be named (the same way as in tregex), by appending =name to the node label. That name can be referred to by subsequent Tsurgeon operations triggered by the same match. All other instances of "=" in node labels must be escaped (i.e., appear as \=); this escaping will be removed by Tsurgeon. For example, if you want to insert an NP trace somewhere and coindex it with a node named "antecedent" you might say

insert (NP (-NONE- *T*=trace)) node-location coindex trace antecedent $

TO DO: Fix the relabel operation to allow any node label without || syntax. Document adjoinH and adjoinF. Provide a spliceIn(Above) operation that lets you insert a node above a given node.

Version:
21 July 2005.
Author:
Roger Levy
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