The underpinnings of a composite measure for automatic term extraction: The case of SRC

The corpus-based identification of those lexical units which serve to describe a given specialized domain usually becomes a complex task, where an analysis oriented to the frequency of words and the likelihood of lexical associations is often ineffective. The goal of this article is to demonstrate that a user-adjustable composite metric such as SRC can accommodate to the diversity of domain-specific glossaries to be constructed from small- and medium-sized specialized corpora of non-structured texts. Unlike for most of the research in automatic term extraction, where single metrics are usually combined indiscriminately to produce the best results, SRC is grounded on the theoretical principles of salience, relevance and cohesion, which have been rationally implemented in the three components of this metric.