/*
* Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
* contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
* this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
* The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
* (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
* the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
*
* http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
*
* Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
* distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
* WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
* See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
* limitations under the License.
*/
package opennlp.tools.parser;
/**
* Interface for full-syntactic parsers.
*/
public interface Parser {
/**
* Returns the specified number of parses or fewer for the specified tokens. <br>
* <b>Note:</b> The nodes within
* the returned parses are shared with other parses and therefore their parent node references
* will not be consistent with their child node reference. {@link Parse#setParent(Parse)}
* can be used to make the parents consistent with a particular parse, but subsequent calls
* to <code>setParents</code> can invalidate the results of earlier calls.<br>
* @param tokens A parse containing the tokens with a single parent node.
* @param numParses The number of parses desired.
* @return the specified number of parses for the specified tokens.
*/
Parse[] parse(Parse tokens, int numParses);
/**
* Returns a parse for the specified parse of tokens.
*
* @param tokens The root node of a flat parse containing only tokens.
* @return A full parse of the specified tokens or the flat chunks of the tokens if a
* fullparse could not be found.
*/
Parse parse(Parse tokens);
}