Refining and Exploiting the Structural Markup of the eWDG

In this paper, the authors describe a semi-automated approach to refine the dictionary-entry structure of the digital version of the Wörterbuch der deutschen Gegenwartssprache (WDG, en.: Dictionary of Present-day German), a dictionary compiled and published between 1952 and 1977 by the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften that comprises six volumes with over 4,500 pages containing more than 120,000 headwords. We discuss the benefits of such a refinement in the context of the dictionary project Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (DWDS, en: Digital Dictionary of the German language). In the current phase of the DWDS project, we aim to integrate multiple dictionary and corpus resources in German language into a digital lexical system (DLS). In this context, we plan to expand the current DWDS interface with several special purpose components, which are adaptive in the sense that they offer specialized data views and search mechanisms for different dictionary functions-e.g. text comprehension, text production-and different user groups-e.g. journalists, translators, linguistic researchers, computational linguists. One prerequisite for generating such data views is the selective access to the lexical items in the article structure of the dictionaries which are the object of study. For this purpose, the representation of the eWDG has to be refined. The focus of this paper is on the semiautomated approach used to transform eWDG into a refined version in which the main structural units can be explicitly accessed. We will show how this refinement opens new and flexible ways of visualizing and querying the lexicographic content of the refined version in the context of the DLS project