Package edu.stanford.nlp.ling

This package contains the different data structures used by JavaNLP throughout the years for dealing with linguistic objects in general, of which words are the most generally used. Most data structures in this package are deprecated. The current recommendation is to represent an annotated word as a CoreMap (e.g., an ArrayCoreMap) from the util package.

CoreMap is a basic type-safe data structure that maps keys to corresponding values, where each value's type must be consistent with the key's definition. The CoreAnnotations class in this package contains many common annotations used by different portions of JavaNLP, but you can define new keys locally to a package if they aren't of general applicability. See the CoreMap unit tests for an example usage of CoreMap and of defining a key.

The oldest code in JavaNLP uses various types of ValueLabel, and might expect data types from the Has* family (like HasWord, HasTag, et al., denoting presence or absence of that particular annotation). Second generation code made use of the MapLabel family (including AbstractMapLabel, FeatureLabel, and IndexedFeatureLabel), but this code has all been converted across to use CoreLabel. More modern code will use CoreMap as its basic data structure. CoreLabel is a CoreMap that unifies all the families of interfaces into a single view of an underlying (Array)CoreMap.

It is recommended that new code use the ArrayCoreMap class from the util package as the base representation of a word when possible. Any CoreMap can be presented as one of the older data structures (MapLabel, HasWord, etc.), by simply wrapping it in a CoreLabel "view" with CoreLabel.forCoreMap(map).

Legacy description: Classes for linguistic concepts which are common to many NLP classes, such as Word, Tag, etc. Also contains classes for building and operating on documents and data collections. Two of the basic interfaces are Document for representing a document as a list of words with meta-data, and DataCollection for representing a collection of documents. The most common document class you will probably use is BasicDocument, which provides support for constructing documents from a variety of input sources.

Author:
Sepandar Kamvar (sdkamvar@stanford.edu), Joseph Smarr (jsmarr@stanford.edu), dramage, rafferty