Usage easiness: the fact that the user operates directly with the graphical representation
induces great easiness in using DGA and highly increases speed (for more details see
What is DGA).
Portability: DGA has been written in Java 2. Being a pure Java application,
DGA can run practically on any platform / under any operating system for which a Java
2 runtime environment (JRE) exists. (It has been tested for Windows 95/98/NT and Linux systems). Since it uses
the pluggable look and feel technology, from the point of view of the interface,
DGA will behave as a native application relatively to the platform on which it runs, the user already
being familiar with the basic items of the interface, such as menus, buttons, standard dialog
boxes etc.
Conformity with up-to-date standards: DGA is designed according to the
EAGLES recommendations
concerning syntactic annotation. The annotated texts are saved in XML format, as representing
the standard in data description adopted by the linguistic community as the standard
way of representing corpora. Although a standard set of XML tags for syntactic annotation does not
exist yet, as is the case for morpho-syntactic annotation (XCES),
DGA uses a minimal set of tags inspired by XCES. Thus, the XML files produced by
DGA can be easily transformed, by means of XSLT,
into XML files which are based on a different vocabulary (tag set) meeting the requirements
of the user or being in conformity with a future standard. For more technical details see
The XML format used by DGA.
Flexibility: besides the fact that syntactic analysis must have the
form of dependency relations, DGA does not impose any other restrictions upon the user. The latter may
easily define and at any time modify his own parts of speech and dependency relations sets,
which will be used in annotation.
