com.aliasi.chunk
Interface NBestChunker

All Superinterfaces:

Chunker

All Known Implementing Classes:

AbstractCharLmRescoringChunker, ChainCrfChunker, CharLmHmmChunker, CharLmRescoringChunker, HmmChunker, RescoringChunker

public interface NBestChunker
extends Chunker

An NBestChunker is a chunker that is able to return results iterating over scored chunkings or scored chunks in order of decreasing likelihood.

For n-best chunkings, the method nBest(char[],int,int,int) returns the n-best chunkings as an iterator. In list form, is often called an n-best list, and represents the top n analyses. Scores are assumed to be joint log probabilities of the chunking (i.e. the input string plus chunks).

N-best chunkers may be used in an application directly, or the n-best list may be rescored using the RescoringChunker.

Since:

LingPipe2.3

Version:

3.0

Author:

Bob Carpenter

Method Summary

Iterator<ScoredObject<Chunking>>

nBest(char[] cs, int start, int end, int maxNBest) Return the scored chunkings of the specified character sequence in order as an iterator in order of score.

Methods inherited from interface com.aliasi.chunk.Chunker

chunk, chunk

Method Detail

nBest

Iterator<ScoredObject<Chunking>> nBest(char[] cs,
                                       int start,
                                       int end,
                                       int maxNBest)

Return the scored chunkings of the specified character sequence in order as an iterator in order of score. The return result is an iterator over scored objects consisting of chunkings and scores. The maximum number of returned chunkings is also specified; for many n-best chunkers, a smaller maximum n-best size leads to faster results.

Parameters:

cs - Underlying character array.

start - Index of first character to analyze.

end - Index of one past the last character to analyze.

maxNBest - The maximum number of results to return.n