Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2002

Researchers who are developing tools for extracting conceptual information automatically from corpora require inventories of linguistic patterns that can be incorporated into their toolsets. While several inventories of English patterns exist, almost none have been published for French. This paper provides an inventory of French linguistic patterns that commonly express generic-specific, part-whole and function relations in specialized texts. Our inventory is accompanied by a discussion of associated problematic issues.

The overall question this article addresses is, “How can information providers facilitate access to and understanding of their information by the general public?” The context of this investigation is the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). We identify three kinds of barriers to finding and using statistical information: user understanding of data scope and availability, user understanding of statistical concepts, and a variety of conceptual and linguistic mismatches. We explore these barriers within three components of the BLS-user environment: communities of users, the scope of BLS information, and the relationship between the concepts and language of BLS and users. The resulting difficulties in information access and use are not unique to the BLS; they can occur any time that non-experts interact with an information-rich web site. The LABSTAT Crosswalk (LSC) is proposed as a solution to these problems, and we discuss its construction and some suggestions for its use. The paper concludes by discussing related problems and solutions, and points out the need for integrated help tools for end users.

This article describes a framework for definitional analysis that presents definitions as dynamic entities encompassing both conceptual relations, following a category template pattern, and its formalization in the terminological definitional structure. The definitional analysis accounts for various levels of complexity, depending on how detailed the understanding is or needs to be in a specific contextual situation. We are presently using this methodology in a research project called OncoTerm. One of the objectives of this project is to elaborate a bilingual terminological database, whose conceptual structure is an extension of an existing resource, the Mikrokosmos Ontology. In our termbase, medical concepts are organized in categories represented by templates, which are systematically applied to all category numbers. The application of the template to more specific concepts generates values that show the inheritance of knowledge structures within a specialized domain. The definitional information within each term entry is thus totally coherent with the information regarding other terms within the same conceptual category. This approach leads to the specification of a language of terminographic definition, which is concise, consistent and applicable not only to the domain of oncology, but to other medical domains and other languages.

This research looks at the complexity inherent in the causal relation and the implications for its representation in a Terminological Knowledge Base (TKB). Supported by a more general study of semantic relation hierarchies, a hierarchical refinement of the causal relation is proposed. It results from a manual search of a corpus which shows that it efficiently captures and formalizes variations expressed in text. The feasibility of determining such categorization during automatic extraction from corpora is also explored. Conceptual graphs are used as a representation formalism to which we have added certainty information to capture the degree of certainty surrounding the interaction between two terms involved in a causal relation.

This paper studies the use of the term educación bilingüe intercultural (ebi) (‘intercultural bilingual education’) both in specialized discourse as well as in non-specialized documents from the perspective of a proposal for a terminology which is at variance with the traditional point of view, oriented towards terminology normalization and prescription. The focus here is on communication: according to this approach, terms are considered as units of natural language with a capacity for reference, but, like words, they can also have other functions (expressive, conative, etc.), and can be used in different communicative settings. This analysis allows us to explain the term intercultural bilingual education in discourses produced in different socio-cultural situations, to observe the degree of competence the producers of such discourses have of such a term and to describe the formal and conceptual variation of the term according to the users and the type of text.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the notion of “conceptual relation pattern” via corpus analysis experiments. On the basis of this bottom-up approach, three major points are discussed. First the degree of dependency between conceptual relation patterns and corpus is examined. This dependency may range from insignificant to complete; it may also be related to corpus genre. Then, the limits of a purely binary conception of relations are examined through the description of patterns taking into account argument structure. Finally, an example in which application may influence pattern choice is presented. Some generally admitted classical assumptions are discussed and revisited under the light of empirical results.