Navigating through dense annotation spaces

Pattern matching, or querying, over annotations is a general purpose paradigm for inspecting, navigating, mining, and transforming annotation repositories-the common representation basis for modern pipelined text processing frameworks. Configurability of such frameworks and expressiveness of feature structure-based annotation schemes account for the 'high density' of some such annotation repositories. This particular characteristic makes challenging the design of a pattern matching engine, capable of interpreting (or imposing) flat patterns over an arbitrarily dense annotation lattice. We present an approach where a finite state device carries out the application of (compiled) grammars over what is, in effect, a linearized 'projection' of a unique route through the lattice; a route derived by a mix of static pattern (grammar) analysis and interpretation of navigational directives within the extended grammar formalism. Our approach achieves a mix of finite state scanning and lattice traversal for expressive and efficient pattern matching in dense annotations stores.