Interpersonal Relations in Biographical Dictionaries. A Case Study

Adopting the concept of “Local Grammars” (M. Gross), which were successfully applied in practice by (Geierhos, 2010) to biographical information extraction in English our project aims to detect, encode, and finally visualize relations between persons. Our corpus consists of the digitised biographical lexicon “Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB)”, roughly 21.000 biographies in 25 volumes in print since 1953. We developed local grammars and suitable dictionaries to describe interpersonal relations and applied them to the corpus with Unitex 3.1. The local grammars were designed to integrate existing TEI-XML structures in the corpus. Using the ability of local grammars in Unitex to act as transducers we were able to produce XML-tags and encode semantic information. Based on grammars for personal names and places we described interpersonal relations like to study, predecessors and successors as well as friends and circles. Afterwards we identified persons (as given in the authority file or index). Finally we displayed relations on our website in an interactive and dynamic way. Utilizing the Javascript library D3.js we represented named relations between identified individuals as ego centred network graphs.