Feature structure is a term that is used to describe the organization of linguistic data. It encodes information about relationships between linguistic units such as words, phrases, and clauses. In text analytics, feature structures are used to store and retrieve information about the text being analyzed.
Feature structures can be compared to other similar terms such as parse trees and dependency graphs. Parse trees are a type of graphical representation of a sentence that shows the syntactic structure of the sentence. Dependency graphs are a type of graphical representation of a sentence that shows the grammatical dependencies between words in a sentence. Both of these representations can be thought of as special cases of feature structures.
There are many different ways to represent feature structures. One popular approach is to use a formalism called feature-Based Syntax (FBS). FBS is a way of representing feature structures using a set of rules. These rules can be used to generate different representations of the same data, depending on the needs of the text analytics application.
Feature structure and attribute-value structure
In computer science, the term attribute-value structure (AVS) is used in a variety of different ways. Sometimes it is used as a synonym for feature structure, while other times it is used to refer to a specific type of feature structure. An AVS is a data structure that consists of a set of attributes and their corresponding values. Each attribute can have multiple values, and each value can be associated with multiple attributes.
The term AVS is also sometimes used in a more general sense to refer to any data structure that consists of a set of named components, where each component has one or more values. For example, an XML document can be thought of as an AVS, where the attributes are the XML tags and the values are the text between the tags.
When used in the context of text analytics, the term AVS usually refers to a specific type of feature structure that is used to store information about the text being analyzed.