Using Prolog for Biological Descriptions

We describe a system which performs biological identification on the basis of natural language descriptions. The system parses texts containing large sets of biological descriptions in restricted natural language and constructs a knowledge base. The system can semi-automatically adapt to a text by extending its lexicon and, to a limited extent, its grammar. Prolog features are important in both tasks. We describe the system’s implementation and its performance on two large texts. The system automatically constructs HTML forms to provide a a World Wide Web identification interface which can be integrated with hypermedia resources. Apart from a few small Unix shell scripts the entire system is implemented in Prolog. We discuss why Prolog was the ideal implementation language for this system.