How to navigate a nltk.tree.Tree?

Question

I've chunked a sentence using:

grammar = '''                                                                                                              
    NP:                                                                                                                    
       {<DT>*(<NN.*>|<JJ.*>)*<NN.*>}                                                                                       
     NVN:                                                                                                                  
       {<NP><VB.*><NP>}                                                                                                    
    '''
chunker = nltk.chunk.RegexpParser(grammar)
tree = chunker.parse(tagged)
print tree

The result looks like:

(S
  (NVN
    (NP The_Pigs/NNS)
    are/VBP
    (NP a/DT Bristol-based/JJ punk/NN rock/NN band/NN))
  that/WDT
  formed/VBN
  in/IN
  1977/CD
  ./.)

But now I'm stuck trying to figure out how to navigate that. I want to be able to find the NVN subtree, and access the left-side noun phrase ("The_Pigs"), the verb ("are") and the right-side noun phrase ("a Bristol-based punk rock band"). How do I do that?

Answer 1

Try:

ROOT = 'ROOT'
tree = ...
def getNodes(parent):
    for node in parent:
        if type(node) is nltk.Tree:
            if node.label() == ROOT:
                print "======== Sentence ========="
                print "Sentence:", " ".join(node.leaves())
            else:
                print "Label:", node.label()
                print "Leaves:", node.leaves()

            getNodes(node)
        else:
            print "Word:", node

getNodes(tree)