Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication - Volume 28, Issue 1, 2022

Abstract

The development of terminologies for domains where these are lacking is a time-consuming and costly task. This article takes a methodological perspective and addresses a general methodological question: how can we, with limited funding, utilise to a maximal degree, existing language resources to create a terminology at a relatively low cost? Although an important player in the maritime industries for many centuries, Norway has not prioritised the systematic development of an official maritime terminology. The article therefore focuses specifically on efforts to develop a national resource for maritime domains. The article describes efforts to create a corpus of popular science and a parallel corpus of technical texts. Six different term extraction methods are applied. These include corpus-based statistical analyses of frequency, collocation and keyness, as well as bilingual term extraction. Finally, the pros and cons of each method are evaluated by means of a cost-benefit analysis.

Abstract

Specialized genres are bound to the communicative context of their discourse community. However, certain genres extend beyond one specific domain, remaining unchanged at different linguistic levels across domains. That seems to be the case of wine and olive oil tasting notes since both analyze and evaluate sensory descriptions. The present study aims at describing and comparing lexical chunks of wine and olive oil tasting notes at a semantic level to show if there is variation in the same genre across domains; we will not only describe, classify and compare lexical chunks, but also identify the way this knowledge is structured and construed in the same genre in both domains. We will test our methodology in a corpus of English tasting notes from both genres written by three different writer profiles: professionals, amateurs and wineries/mills. Our results will be useful for scholars as well as technical writers when writing tasting notes.

Abstract

The paper discusses the main results of an analysis of Spanish accounting terminology, based on the exploitation of three different corpora. The analysis was aimed at measuring the level of terminology variation in Spanish accounting and at assessing the suitability of accounting standards and companies’ financial statements for terminology extraction in the translation of accounting texts. The results evidence a terminological variation of around 25% in international accounting standards and a considerable lack of consistency in the use of accounting terminology in the financial statements of Spanish companies, both in the Spanish originals and in their English translations.

Abstract

We propose to identify, for the French language, the senses and subsenses of travail in the field of international commerce. We also intend to present the main weak idioms containing this form, from a corpus that has been constituted ex novo in the framework of the DIACOM-fr project (Department of Foreign Languages, University of Verona), part of the Excellence Project “Le Digital Humanities applicate alle lingue e letterature straniere” (“Digital Humanities applied to foreign modern languages and literatures”).

The senses and subsenses as well as the weak idioms, classified on the basis of a number of semantic labels, will be represented in a draft of terminological network.

Abstract

We describe the creation of a knowledge base in the field of karstology using the frame-based approach. Apart from providing a new multilingual resource using manually annotated definitions as the source of structured information, the main focus is on exploring text mining methods to identify targeted knowledge structures in specialised corpora. The first stage of this process is the design of a domain model and its implementation in a definition annotation task. Once annotation is completed, an analysis of typical co-occurrence patterns between semantic categories and the relations describing them allows us to discern ideal definition templates. We demonstrate that such templates contribute to a more comprehensive and structured representations of concepts, but also help us design targeted text mining experiments to retrieve new semantic relations from text. Two such experiments are presented, the first using intersections of word embeddings to identify words expressing a specific semantic relation, and the second using the embedding of the semantic relation to extract multiword units which contain the target relation. Results suggest that the proposed methods are promising for capturing the semantic properties of relations in frame-based knowledge modelling.

Abstract

As with many tasks in natural language processing, automatic term extraction (ATE) is increasingly approached as a machine learning problem. So far, most machine learning approaches to ATE broadly follow the traditional hybrid methodology, by first extracting a list of unique candidate terms, and classifying these candidates based on the predicted probability that they are valid terms. However, with the rise of neural networks and word embeddings, the next development in ATE might be towards sequential approaches, i.e., classifying each occurrence of each token within its original context. To test the validity of such approaches for ATE, two sequential methodologies were developed, evaluated, and compared: one feature-based conditional random fields classifier and one embedding-based recurrent neural network. An additional comparison was added with a machine learning interpretation of the traditional approach. All systems were trained and evaluated on identical data in multiple languages and domains to identify their respective strengths and weaknesses. The sequential methodologies were proven to be valid approaches to ATE, and the neural network even outperformed the more traditional approach. Interestingly, a combination of multiple approaches can outperform all of them separately, showing new ways to push the state-of-the-art in ATE.

This article reviews Terminology Translation in Chinese Contexts: Theory and Practice978-0-367-43954-5