What is the linguistic significance of dep and gov methods in Stanford NLP's Typed Dependency class?

Question

I am looking at a TypedDependency object like this: root(ROOT-0, fired-4), which is part of the StanfordNLP suite.

If I call the object's .dep() method I get fired/VBD

If I call the object's .gov() method I get ROOT

These methods have cryptic names, which makes me think that maybe they refer to common linguistic concepts related to dependency parsing (that I don't know).

What do they mean?

Answer 1

This extract is from Stanford typed dependencies manual:

In the plain text format, a dependency is written as abbreviated_relation_name(governor, dependent) where the governor and the dependent are words in the sentence to which a number indicating the position of the word in the sentence is appended.

So, dep is the dependent word, and gov is the governor.