com.languagecomputer.api.text
Interface Attribute

All Superinterfaces:

Text

All Known Implementing Classes:

DefaultAttribute

public interface Attribute
extends Text

Representation of an attribute (set). Attributes are similar to Events in that they have types and roles. But attributes are entity-focused instead of event- (or action-) focused. Furthermore, most attributes will be simple pairs (e.g., a person's height), but others are more complex and include additional information, often the date and location (e.g., a person's birth date and location).

The Attribute span should cover all its roles and any information considered in the context of the attribute set. For example, a sentence-level attribute detection system would create an Attribute that spans the entire sentence and all its roles are contained within that sentence.

Since:

1.0

Author:

Kirk Roberts

Field Summary

static AnnotationType<Attribute>

TYPE

Method Summary

Set<String>	getAvailableRoles() Returns the set role types that are available for this Attribute instance.
Collection<Text>	getRoles(String roleName) Returns the Text of the role instances for this Attribute with the given roleName.
String	getType() Returns the type of this Attribute.

Methods inherited from interface com.languagecomputer.api.text.Text

getAnnotationType, getCongruentAnnotations, getDocument, getDocumentID, getEndCharOffset, getIntersectingAnnotations, getRawString, getStartCharOffset, getSubAnnotations, getSuperAnnotations

Field Detail

TYPE

static final AnnotationType<Attribute> TYPE

Method Detail

getType

String getType()

Returns the type of this Attribute.

Returns:

This Attribute's type (or name).

getAvailableRoles

Set<String> getAvailableRoles()

Returns the set role types that are available for this Attribute instance. There may be more types of roles for this type of attribute, but this method will only return the types of roles that it knows about. Furthermore, it is not guaranteed that all available roles have an instance of that role attached to this Attribute. In other words, if a system knows all the possible role names, it may return them here even if not all the roles are found within this Attribute, but the caller should also be able to handle the case where this Attribute only knows about the role names based on what roles objects are actually attached to it.

Returns:

A Set of role names that are known to this Attribute instance.

getRoles

Collection<Text> getRoles(String roleName)

Returns the Text of the role instances for this Attribute with the given roleName. For many roles, this will be a singleton Collection, but having multiple roles of the same type is supported as well.

Parameters:

roleName - The name of the role to get the instances of.

Returns:

A Collection of Texts for all the roles instances associated with this Attribute with the given roleName, or an empty Collection if none exist.