Terminology: New needs, new perspectives

Terminology is reaching an important moment in its development. Within firms, new terminological needs are appearing which go beyond those of traditional translation departments. Thanks to the results of natural-language processing (NLP) and knowledge acquisition and representation in artificial intelligence (AI), new possibilities for integrating terminological data are coming to light. In order to meet these new needs, it is necessary to approach the analysis of phenomena with strong theoretical bases. The article proposes to root terminology firmly within linguistics, while paying special attention to the specific link of terminology with knowledge. In limited fields, the strong link between linguistic signs and concepts permits linguistic research to put forward hypotheses concerning the extraction of terms, of links between terms and concepts, and of relations between concepts. It is necessary to elaborate a methodology for a linguistic analysis of how terms function. By developing the notion of "deviance " (deviant behaviour of the terminological system in comparison with the expected behaviour of the lexical system), the article presents a first linguistically based classification.