Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication - Online First

Polysemy, even when it is considered within specialized domains, is a recurrent phenomenon and the topic is debated from time to time in terminology literature. Part of this literature still advocates ways to prevent polysemy. Another portion recognizes the prevalence of polysemy, especially in specialized corpora, but considers it from the perspective of other phenomena, such as ambiguity, indeterminacy, categorization or variation. Although the number of perspectives on meaning have increased over the years, the treatment of polysemy in terminological resources is still unsatisfactory. This article first shows that polysemy is an integral part of specialized communication and that there are different kinds of domain-specific polysemy. Then, it reviews selected perspectives that have been taken on polysemy in terminology literature. The treatment of 45 polysemous lexical items in four specialized resources is then analysed. Finally, different methods based on lexical semantics are proposed to account for polysemy in terminological resources.

A term is a lexical unit with specialized meaning in a particular domain. Terms may be simple (STs) or multi-word (MWTs). The organization of terms gives a representation of the structure of domain knowledge, which is based on the relationships between the concepts of the domain. However, relations between MWTs are often underrepresented in terminology resources. This work aims to explore distributional semantic models for capturing terminological relations between multi-word terms through lexical substitution and analogy. The experiments show that the results of the analogy-based method are globally better than those of the one based on lexical substitution and that analogy is well suited to the acquisition of synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy while lexical substitution performs best for hypernymy.