Proximity

When faced with the choice of the best match, that is to say, when several candidate matches overlap, the following criteria are used:

The shortest match in terms of token is preferred. For example, searching for A NEAR B in the text A A B B selects A [A B] B.

The greater the sum of the lengths of element annotations the better. For example, if more than one annotation A appear on a token, the longest is chosen.

The configuration includes:

• A list of <ProximityElement> defining the set of annotations to search for. These elements have the following attributes:

  • annotation: the annotation tag

  • Optional: value: the annotation display form to match. Regular expressions can be used by enclosing the string in slashes.

  • mandatory (default true): when set to false, the processor can report matches where this annotation is missing.

  • Optional: name: a name that can be referenced in the output annotation format using $name. Names must be made of characters in [0-9a-zA-Z].

• An output annotation annotation tag and an optional displayForm string defining a format where named elements can be referenced to build the output display form. If displayForm is undefined, the output annotation does not have any value.

• An ordered Boolean attribute forcing the annotations to be matched in their definition order when set to true. If false, any permutation of the annotations list is allowed to match.

• An allowElementOverlap Boolean attribute (default= false) allowing the annotations of elements to overlap when set to true.

• A number of nonmutually exclusive distance constraints:

  • sentenceScope (default false) – if true, each match is to be contained in a sentence, no match spans several sentences.

  • paragraphScope (default false) – if true, each match is to be contained in a paragraph, no match spans several paragraphs.

  • windowSize (default 2048, max 8192) – maximum size of a match in terms of token.

  • minDistance (default none, max 4096) – the minimum distance between two elements in terms of token.

  • maxDistance (default none, max 4096) – the maximum distance between two elements in terms of token.

Proximity processor XML configuration file sample

<Proximity xmlns="exa:com.exalead.linguistic.v10" annotation="output" displayForm="when:$date who:$people."
 ordered="false" 
windowSize="100" sentenceScope="true" >
   <ProximityElement annotation="NE.date" value="/[1-5] 201./" mandatory="true" name="date" />
   <ProximityElement annotation="NE.famouspeople" value="Olivier Panis" name="people" />
</Proximity>