Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2008

Terminological information is a key element in the construction of a knowledge base. In order for a knowledge base to be useful to different users, terminological information should be extracted from corpora so as to reflect the different pragmatic nuances. Puertoterm is a knowledge base in the field of Coastal Engineering, which has made use of corpus information to develop terminological entries. It also includes contextual information in such a way that this information interacts with other elements of the knowledge base. We describe the methodology followed in the project regarding corpus design, retrieval of lexical information, conceptual organization of the domain of Coastal Engineering, and the elaboration of terminological entries.

This article describes an evaluation of the Syntex tool used to define a terminology reference frame base for building a new dictionary. This tool is then used in an experiment in which technical terms are extracted from different corpora. These terms belong to the sub-domains “Fuel” and “Reactors” in the nuclear engineering field. The strategy used to exploit the results is explained and the terms extracted are analyzed. This method consists in submitting the results to nuclear field experts and combining their conclusions with terminological assessments. This article illustrates how these kinds of specialized contributions can be effectively employed. It is also shown how this orginal procedure can be generalized to other sub-domains in nuclear engineering.

Terminology as a set of concept carriers crystallizes our special knowledge about a subject. Automatic term recognition (ATR) plays a critical role in the processing and management of various kinds of information, knowledge and documents, e.g., knowledge acquisition via text mining. Measuring termhood properly is one of the core issues involved in ATR. This article presents a novel approach to termhood measurement for mono-word terms via corpus comparison, which quantifies the termhood of a term candidate as its rank difference in a domain and a background corpus. Our ATR experiments to identify legal terms in Hong Kong (HK) legal texts with the British National Corpus (BNC) as background corpus provide evidence to confirm the validity and effectiveness of this approach. Without any prior knowledge and ad hoc heuristics, it achieves a precision of 97.0% on the top 1000 candidates and a precision of 96.1% on the top 10% candidates that are most highly ranked by the termhood measure, illustrating a state-of-the-art performance on mono-word ATR in the field.

This paper presents the results of a corpus-based diachronic study of the migration of vocabulary from the language of ecology into non-scientific language and vice versa. The results are extracted from a bilingual (French and English) comparable corpus compiled for the study. We show that if terms can get de-terminologized over time, words which have become widespread in the media can, in return, get terminologized over the years and move into the lexicon of ecology, as is the case in English with carbon neutral. We also show that the popularity and productivity of the prefix eco- in English does not seem to apply to éco- in French, probably because of the syntactic and semantic competition with the modifier bio. The recent emergence of compensation carbone in the French media is also discussed.