Evaluation of terms and term extraction systems: A practical approach

Term extraction may be defined as a text mining activity whose main purpose is to obtain all the terms included in a text of a given domain. Since the eighties, and mainly due to the rapid scientific advances as well as the evolution of the communication systems, there has been a growing interest in obtaining the terms found in written documents. A number of techniques and strategies have been proposed for satisfying this requirement. At present it seems that term extraction has reached a maturity stage. Nevertheless, many of the systems proposed fail to qualitatively present their results, almost every system evaluates its abilities in an ad hoc manner (if any, many times). Often, the authors do not explain their evaluation methodology; therefore comparisons between different implementations are difficult to draw. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art of term extraction systems evaluation in the framework of natural language systems evaluation. The main approaches are presented, with a focus on their limitations. As an instantiation of some ideas for overcoming these limitations, the evaluation framework is applied to YATE, a hybrid term extractor.