Graph traversals

Queries can also incorporate graph traversals, most commonly used for traversing the dependency syntax graph.

A graph traversal is encoded with two parts: - a direction, and - a label

The direction that the edge (e.g., dependency) is traversed is encoded by placing a > (outgoing) or < (incoming) in front of the label.

The edge/dependency labels, as strings, support regular expression notation (i.e., /nmod_.*/). The full string rules are provided here.

So, for example, to traverse an incoming nsubj edge, you'd use:

<nsubj

and to traverse an outgoing dobj or xcomp you'd use:

>/dobj|xcomp/

Wildcards

Odinson supports wildcards for graph traversals. They are: - << : any incoming edge - >> : any outgoing edge

Quantifiers and Expansion

Like any other pattern component, graph traversals (as well as these wildcards) can be combined with quantifiers, e.g., >>{2,3}. Additionally, groups of graph traversals can be wrapped in parentheses and quantified.
For example, to specify traversing an outgoing nsubj edge and optionally up to two conj_and edges, you can use:

She saw >dobj [] (>conj_and []){,2}

In the sentence "She saw me and Julio," this will traverse the dobj and the following conj_and and extract Julio. However, if we want to use the quantified (and here, optional) graph traversals to expand the mention, we can indicate it with (?^ ... ) as follows:

She saw >dobj (?^ [] >conj_and []){,2})

The left-hand side, (?^, indicates where the expanded mention should begin, and the final ) indicate where it should stop. The above pattern, with the same sentence, would instead match me and Julio.