nltk.ImmutableTree.fromstring

ImmutableTree.fromstring(s, brackets=u'()', read_node=None, read_leaf=None, node_pattern=None, leaf_pattern=None, remove_empty_top_bracketing=False)

Read a bracketed tree string and return the resulting tree. Trees are represented as nested brackettings, such as:

(S (NP (NNP John)) (VP (V runs)))
Parameters:
  • s (str) – The string to read
  • brackets (str (length=2)) – The bracket characters used to mark the beginning and end of trees and subtrees.
  • read_leaf (read_node,) –

    If specified, these functions are applied to the substrings of s corresponding to nodes and leaves (respectively) to obtain the values for those nodes and leaves. They should have the following signature:

    read_node(str) -> value

    For example, these functions could be used to process nodes and leaves whose values should be some type other than string (such as FeatStruct). Note that by default, node strings and leaf strings are delimited by whitespace and brackets; to override this default, use the node_pattern and leaf_pattern arguments.

  • leaf_pattern (node_pattern,) – Regular expression patterns used to find node and leaf substrings in s. By default, both nodes patterns are defined to match any sequence of non-whitespace non-bracket characters.
  • remove_empty_top_bracketing (bool) – If the resulting tree has an empty node label, and is length one, then return its single child instead. This is useful for treebank trees, which sometimes contain an extra level of bracketing.
Returns:

A tree corresponding to the string representation s. If this class method is called using a subclass of Tree, then it will return a tree of that type.
Return type:

Tree