The Dictionary of the Serbian Academy: from the Text to the Lexical Database

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the project of digitization of the Dictionary of the Serbo-Croatian Standard and Vernacular Language. Scanning and character recognition were a particular challenge, since various non-standard character set encoding was used in the course of the almost 60-year long production of the dictionary. The first aim of the project was to formalize the micro-structure of the dictionary articles in order to parse the digitized text of and transform it into structured data stored in relational lexical database. This approach is compatible with several standard structured forms and ontologies (TEI, LMF, Ontolex, LexInfo). A lexical database model was designed in compliance with these structured forms, following mostly the lemon model. Mapping of the lexical entry markers to LexInfo and TEI enabled export of the lexical data to the mentioned formats. A software solution for the dictionary text analysis, parsing and lexical database population was developed and tested on the first and the last published volumes of the dictionary (which contain 27,141 articles in total). An evaluation of the results shows that the developed model and software solution can be successfully used for the other volumes as well.