DQD: the & operator

The & operator expresses a location-wise overlap relation. As such, it can only be applied to entities that are location-aligned.

It is a binary operator: it uses the syntax x&y, where x and y are labels referring to entities that should overlap on the location plane.

x can be of two types. First, it can be the name of an annotation layer in the corpus. For example, the block below means that the smudge s should be part of the page labeled p

Page p

Smudge&p s

Second, it can be the keyword sequence, in which case all the entities declared within the scope of the sequence must be contained (location-wise) within the labeled entity. For example, the block below means that we are looking for a named entity contained (location-wise) in a segment, which itselfs contains the sequence "Monte Rosa":

Segment s

NamedEntity&s ne

sequence&ne seq
    Token
        form = "Monte"
    Token
        form = "Rosa"

Note that such a query only makes sense in a corpus where tokens, named entities and segments have all been aligned on the location plane, which is not the case for all corpora that define a location plane.