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Article published In: Computational Terminology
Edited by Ayla Rigouts Terryn and Patrick Drouin
[Terminology 31:1] 2025
► pp. 110–135

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Impact of automatic term extraction on terminology work

A qualitative interview study in institutional settings

ORCiD logo with link | Austrian Academy of Sciences | University of Graz
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 23 May 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00085.wis
Abstract
A crucial task in any type of terminology work is identifying and extracting terms from relevant sources, which can be done manually or via (semi-)automatic term extraction processes. Given the recent advances in automatic term extraction (ATE) research, this paper explores the impact of ATE on terminology work in institutional settings (academic institutions, administrations, European institutions and international organizations) based on qualitative data. The analysis of 15 semi-structured expert interviews conducted in 2023 shows that the newest advances in research in ATE have not had an immediate impact on terminology practices in institutional settings for the study participants. This paper aims to discuss the reasons for the slow uptake of ATE in institutional settings, such as the gap between ATE tools developed in research and ATE components integrated in off-the-shelf terminology or corpus management systems, the lack of integration into existing workflows, the lack of support for certain languages, especially for less-resourced languages, as well as reasons related to source materials.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Tools used for Automatic Term Extraction
  • 3.Automatic term extraction in the context of institutional terminology practices
  • 4.Method
  • 5.Results from the interview data
    • 5.1Approaches
    • 5.2Tools
    • 5.3Integration into workflow
    • 5.4Satisfaction with the results of ATE
    • 5.5Contribution to the development of ATE methods
    • 5.6User training for term extraction tools
    • 5.7Reasons for not using automatic term extraction
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
References (47)
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