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A Semantic Approach to the Inclusion of Complex Nominals in English Terminographic Resources

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Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology (EUROPHRAS 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10596))

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Abstract

Complex nominals (CNs) are characterized by the omission of the semantic relation between their constituents due to noun packing. Despite their frequency in specialized texts written in English [1] their representation and inclusion in knowledge resources has received little research attention. This paper presents a proposal for the inclusion of CNs in an English terminographic resource on renewable energy. For that purpose, we used knowledge patterns and paraphrases to access the meaning of CNs in a wind power corpus. We then filled the definitional templates proposed by Frame-based Terminology [2]. Our main goal was to conceptually organize a term entry to facilitate knowledge of the domain while keeping the entry length to a minimum. Furthermore, this proposal is a valuable starting point toward the development of bilingual and multilingual resources since translation should be based on meaning. Our results also afforded insights into compound term formation in English, as reflected in the addition of specific values to the semantic relations encoded by the hypernym. Term instability and multidimensionality were also prevalent.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This corpus is planned to be annotated with CNs occurrences and made available in Open Corpora (Sketch Engine).

  2. 2.

    Even though TermoStat is an excellent term extractor, it often offers some noise due to the inclusion of wrong CNs (e.g. page u) or irrelevant parts of longer CNs (e.g. mw wind).

  3. 3.

    Since we focused on CNs that were hyponyms of wind turbine, the search was limited to CNs mostly formed by three or more constituents. This explains the relatively low frequency of term candidates (35 occurrences on average). However, since they are key concepts of the domain, they should be described in a resource specialized in wind power.

  4. 4.

    The overlap in the CNs of this study is not a general rule since many hyponyms do not show the same linguistic form as their hypernyms, e.g. abrasion as a hyponym of erosion.

  5. 5.

    Usage examples should be explicitly stated in printed resources.

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Acknowledgements

This research was carried out as part of project FF2014-52740-P, Cognitive and Neurological Bases for Terminology-enhanced Translation (CONTENT), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. Funding was also provided by an FPU grant given by the Spanish Ministry of Education to the first author. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

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  1. University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Melania Cabezas-García & Pamela Faber

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  1. Melania Cabezas-García
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Correspondence to Melania Cabezas-García .

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  1. University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, United Kingdom

    Ruslan Mitkov

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Cabezas-García, M., Faber, P. (2017). A Semantic Approach to the Inclusion of Complex Nominals in English Terminographic Resources. In: Mitkov, R. (eds) Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology. EUROPHRAS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10596. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69805-2_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69805-2_11

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