edu.stanford.nlp.stats.Sampler Maven / Gradle / Ivy

package edu.stanford.nlp.stats;

/**
 * An interace for drawing samples from the label
 * space of an object.  The classifiers themselves are
 * {@link Sampleable}.  For instance, a parser can
 * {@link Sampleable} and then vends Sampler instances
 * based on specific inputs (words in the sentence).
 * The Sampler would then return parse trees (over
 * that particular sentence, not over all sentences)
 * drawn from
 * the underlying distribution.
 *
 * @author Jenny Finkel
 */
public interface Sampler {

  /**
   * @return labels (of type T) drawn from the underlying
   * distribution for the observation this Sampler was
   * created for.
   */
  public T drawSample();

}