Antonio San Martín

Recent Advances in EcoLexicon

ABSTRACT:EcoLexicon is a multilingual terminological knowledge base concerning the environment. It is the practical application of Frame-based Terminology, a cognitive approach to the representation of specialized knowledge. Recent enhancements include the EcoLexicon English corpus, a phraseological module, and a flexible approach to terminological definitions.

Semantic annotation to characterize contextual variation in terminological noun compounds: a pilot study.

Noun compounds (NCs) are semantically complex and not fully compositional, as is often assumed. This paper presents a pilot study regarding the semantic annotation of environmental NCs with a view to accessing their semantics and exploring their domain-based contextual variation. Our results showed that the semantic annotation of NCs afforded important insights into how context impacts their conceptualization.

Définition terminologique : systématisation de règles de rédaction dans les domaines de l’informatique et de l’environnement

Terminologists agree on a certain number of rules regarding definition writing. However, these rules are often presented as very general and informal guidelines aimed to guide terminologists. The lack of more formal rules results in problems of systematicity in specialized resources. To help fix this problem, we propose definition writing rules for terms that are semantically linked in a specialized subject field. These rules use as input the definition of a base term (for instance, to program) and the information about the semantic relationship this term holds with a second one (for instance, to reprogram means “to program once again”). Based on a previous analysis of English terms (San Martin and L’Homme 2014), this work adapts the rules defined for English to French terms and extends them to other kinds of paradigmatic relationships (near synonymy, antonymy, actantial relationships, etc.). Results show that some lexical relationships can be used to create rules that allow the generation of definitions without human intervention; for other relationships, minimal intervention is required. Finally, other relationships do not lend themselves to the automatic or semi-automatic generation of definitions.