how to write spacy matcher of POS regex

Question

Spacy has two features I\'d like to combine - part-of-speech (POS) and rule-based matching.

How can I combine them in a neat way?

For example - let\'s say i

Answer 1

Sure, simply use the POS attribute.

import spacy
nlp = spacy.load('en')
from spacy.matcher import Matcher
from spacy.attrs import POS
matcher = Matcher(nlp.vocab)
matcher.add_pattern("Adjective and noun", [{POS: 'ADJ'}, {POS: 'NOUN'}])

doc = nlp(u'what are the main issues')
matches = matcher(doc)

Answer 2

Eyal Shulman's answer was helpful, but it makes you hard code a pattern matcher, not exactly use a regular expression.

I wanted to use regular expressions, so I made my own solution:

    pattern = r'(<VERB>)*(<ADV>)*(<PART>)*(<VERB>)+(<PART>)*' 
    ## create a string with the pos of the sentence
    posString = ""
    for w in doc[start:end].sent:
        posString += "<" + w.pos_ + ">"

    lstVerb = []
    for m in re.compile(pattern).finditer(posString):
        ## each m is a verb phrase match
        ## count the "<" in m to find how many tokens we want
        numTokensInGroup = m.group().count('<')

        ## then find the number of tokens that came before that group.
        numTokensBeforeGroup = posString[:m.start()].count('<') 

        verbPhrase = sentence[numTokensBeforeGroup:numTokensBeforeGroup+numTokensInGroup]
        ## starting at character offset m.start()
        lstVerb.append(verbPhrase)