UIMA Ruta: Copy the feature value from a contained annotation to a containing annotation - uima

Question

Note: This seems heavily related to Setting feature value to the count of containing annotation in UIMA Ruta. But I cannot quite apply the answer to my situation.
I am analyzing plain text documents where the following structure is assumed:
Document (one, of course)
Section (many)
Heading (one per section)
I am being asked to identify sections by checking whether their headings satisfy conditions. A useful and obvious sort of condition would be: does the heading match a given regular expression? A less-useful but perhaps more achievable condition would be: does the heading contain a given text?
I could and have already achieved this by taking a list of tuples of regular expressions and section titles, and at design time, for each member of the list, as such:
BLOCK(forEach) SECTION{} {
...
HEADING{REGEXP(".*table.*contents.*", true) ->
SETFEATURE("value", "Table of Contents")};
...
}
SECTION{ -> SETFEATURE("value", "Table of Contents")}
<- { HEADING.headingValue == "Table of Contents"; };
This approach is fairly straightforward but has a few big drawbacks:
It heavily violates the DRY principle
Even when writing the rule for just one section to identify, the rule author must copy the section title twice (it should only need to be specified once)
It makes the script needlessly long and unwieldy
It puts a big burden on the rule author, who in an ideal case, would only need to know Regex - not Ruta
So I wanted to refactor to achieve the following goals:
A text file is used to store the regular expressions and corresponding titles, and the rule iterates over these pairs
Features, rather than types, are used to differentiate different sections/headings (i.e. like above, using SECTION.value=="Table of Contents" and not TableOfContentsSection)
After looking over the UIMA Ruta reference to see which options were available to achieve these goals, I settled on the following:
Use a WORDTABLE to store tuples of section title, words to find / regex if possible, lookup type - so for instance, Table of Contents,contents,sectiontitles
Use MARKTABLE to mark an intermediate annotation type LookupMatch whose hint feature contains the section title and whose lookup feature contains the type of lookup we are talking about
For each HEADING, see if a LookupMatch.lookup == "sectiontitle" is inside, and if it is, copy the LookupMatch.hint to the heading's value field.
For each SECTION, see if a HEADING with a value is inside; if so, copy the value to the SECTION.value field.
It was not quite a surprise to find that implementing steps 3 and 4 was not so easy. That's where I am at and why I am asking for help.
// STEP 1
WORDTABLE Structure_Heading_WordTable =
'/uima/resource/structure/Structure_Heading_WordTable.csv';
// STEP 2
Document.docType == "Contract"{
-> MARKTABLE(LookupMatch, // annotation
2, // lookup column #
Structure_Heading_WordTable, // word table to lookup
true, // case-insensitivity
0, // length before case-insensitivity
"", // characters to ignore
0, // matches to ignore
"hint" = 1, "lookup" = 3 // features
)
};
// STEPS 3 AND 4 ... ???
BLOCK(ForEach) LookupMatch.lookup == "sectiontitle"{} {
???
}
HEADING{ -> SETFEATURE("value", ???)} <- {
???
};
Here is my first real stab at it:
HEADING{ -> SETFEATURE("value", lookupMatchHint)} <- {
LookupMatch.lookup == "HeadingWords"{ -> GETFEATURE("hint", lookupMatchHint)};
};
TL; DR
How can I conditionally copy a feature value from one annotation to another? GETFEATURE kind of assumes that you only get 1...