Tregex and Tsurgeon: tools for querying and manipulating tree data structures

Abstract

With syntactically annotated corpora becoming increasingly available for a variety of languages and grammatical frameworks, tree query tools have proven invaluable to linguists and computer scientists for both data exploration and corpusbased research. We provide a combined engine for tree query (Tregex) and manipulation (Tsurgeon) that can operate on arbitrary tree data structures with no need for preprocessing. Tregex remedies several expressive and implementational limitations of existing query tools, while Tsurgeon is to our knowledge the most expressive tree manipulation utility available. 1.