Empirical observation of term variations and principles for their description

Daille, Béatrice; Habert, Benoît; Jacquemin, Christian; Royauté, Jean

doi:10.1075/term.3.2.02dai

Article published In: Terminology
Vol. 3:2 (1996) ► pp.197–257

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Empirical observation of term variations and principles for their description

Béatrice Daille | University of Nantes, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Fontenay St. Cloud, Institut National pour l'Information Scientifique et Technique

Benoît Habert | University of Nantes, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Fontenay St. Cloud, Institut National pour l'Information Scientifique et Technique

Christian Jacquemin | University of Nantes, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Fontenay St. Cloud, Institut National pour l'Information Scientifique et Technique

Jean Royauté | University of Nantes, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Fontenay St. Cloud, Institut National pour l'Information Scientifique et Technique

Published online: 1 January 1996

https://doi.org/10.1075/term.3.2.02dai

Terms are often supposed not to be prone to variation. Empirical observation of terms in various corpora (telecommunication, physics, medicine) shows, on the contrary, the quantitative and qualitative importance of term variation. We give a precise linguistic description of the rules relating to controlled terms and observed variants and of the constraints on these rules. This description leads to novel means of enriching terminologies via the generation of possible term variants or the simplification of nominal parse trees in order to discover potential variants.

Keywords: Terminology Acquisition, Variation, Linguistic Description of Terms, Observation of Terms in Corpora

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