Declarative Parsing and Annotation of Electronic Dictionaries

We present a declarative annotation toolkit based on XML and PROLOG technologies, and we apply it for annotating the Campe Dictionary to obtain an electronic version in XML (TEI). For parsing flat structures, we use a very compact grammar formalism called extended definite clause grammars (EDCG’s), which is an extended version of the DCG’s that are well–known from the logic programming language PROLOG. For accessing and transforming XML structures, we use the XML query and transformation language FNQUERY. It turned out, that the declarative approach in PROLOG is much more readable, reliable, flexible, and faster than an alternative implementation which we had made in JAVA and XSLT for the TEXTGRID community project.