Gorn address

A Gorn address (Gorn, 1967) is a method of identifying and addressing any node within a tree data structure. This notation is often used for identifying nodes in a parse tree defined by phrase structure rules.

The Gorn address is a sequence of zero or more integers conventionally separated by dots, e.g., 0 or 1.0.1. The root which Gorn calls * can be regarded as the empty sequence. And the ${\displaystyle j}$-th child of the ${\displaystyle i}$-th child has an address ${\displaystyle i.j}$, counting from 0.

It is named after American computer scientist Saul Gorn.

References

• Gorn, S. (1967). Explicit definitions and linguistic dominoes. Systems and Computer Science, Eds. J. Hart & S. Takasu. 77-115. University of Toronto Press, Toronto Canada.