Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication - Volume 3, Issue 2, 1996

Terms are often supposed not to be prone to variation. Empirical observation of terms in various corpora (telecommunication, physics, medicine) shows, on the contrary, the quantitative and qualitative importance of term variation. We give a precise linguistic description of the rules relating to controlled terms and observed variants and of the constraints on these rules. This description leads to novel means of enriching terminologies via the generation of possible term variants or the simplification of nominal parse trees in order to discover potential variants.

Following the growing interest in "corpus-based" approaches to computational linguistics, a number of studies have recently appeared on the topic of automatic term recognition or extraction. Because a successful term-recognition method has to be based on proper insights into the nature of terms, studies of automatic term recognition not only contribute to the applications of computational linguistics but also to the theoretical foundation of terminology. Many studies on automatic term recognition treat interesting aspects of terms, but most of them are not well founded and described.This paper tries to give an overview of the principles and methods of automatic term recognition. For that purpose, two major trends are examined, i.e., studies in automatic recognition of significant elements for indexing mainly carried out in information-retrieval circles and current research in automatic term recognition in the field of computational linguistics.

This paper examines evaluation criteria for term-extraction software. These tools have gained popularity over the past few years, but they come in all sorts of structures and their performance cannot be compared (qualitatively) to that of humans performing the same task. The lists obtained after an automated extraction must always be filtered by users. The evaluation form proposed here consists of a certain number of preprocessing criteria (such as the language analyzed by the software, identification strategies used, etc.) and a postprocessing criterion (performance of software) that users must take into account before they start using such systems. Each criterion is defined and illustrated with examples. Commercial tools have also been tested.

Since multimedia information is complicated inform and vast in amount, conventional database-management systems or knowledge-base-management systems are hardly appropriate to store, manage, and utilize expertise effectively. A new type of information model is developed according to an analysis of the information used by specialists for research and development, and a prototype information-management system is implemented. The system consists of three parts: (1) flexible storage without special constraints on format and representation; (2) self-organization of terms by extracting semantic relationships among them; and (3) advanced utilization functions such as analogical reasoning, inductive inference, abductive inference, as well as information retrieval, numerical calculation, and deductive inference. Thesauri which are automatically compiled and refined are used as conceptual structures of the information. Thus obtained, conceptual structures can be used for sophisticated applications, including analogical reasoning, induction, and abduction. The principle of open-world reasoning and an algorithm of analogy are developed. An example of practical application to polymer information is presented.

ISO 10241:1992 ("International Terminology Standards — Preparation and Layout") is a basic standard which prescribes a uniform method for drafting the standard glossaries known as ISO terminology standards. Among other problems with ISO 10241 is a clause which generally prohibits the use of articles at the beginning of definitions. Here I shall identify two specific reasons why English definitions should begin with articles. They are the enormous precedent for this practice throughout the English language and the semantic precision that is lost when articles are missing. I maintain that there is no place in ISO for a rule that forces English or any other language into violation of its semantic precision and norms of usage.

The article suggests that instead of the obsolete and imprecise "polymer", the exact term is "macromolecule ", and in the future it should be applied in all fields of macromolecular science.