Semgrex and Ssurgeon, Searching and Manipulating Dependency Graphs
This work addresses a specific tooling need for NLP researchers and developers working with dependency graphs, but it is incremental as it builds on existing systems.
The authors tackled the problem of searching and manipulating dependency graphs, which is time-consuming and challenging, by documenting Semgrex for searching and introducing Ssurgeon for manipulation, with integration into Java and Python toolkits for processing natural text.
Searching dependency graphs and manipulating them can be a time consuming and challenging task to get right. We document Semgrex, a system for searching dependency graphs, and introduce Ssurgeon, a system for manipulating the output of Semgrex. The compact language used by these systems allows for easy command line or API processing of dependencies. Additionally, integration with publicly released toolkits in Java and Python allows for searching text relations and attributes over natural text.