George A. Vouros

The Use of Terminological Knowledge Bases in Software Localization

This paper describes the work that was undertaken in the Glossasoft 1 project in the area of terminology management. Some of the drawbacks of existing terminology management systems are outlined and an alternative approach to maintaining terminological data is proposed. The approach which we advocate relies on knowledge-based representation techniques. These are used to model conceptual knowledge about the terms included in the database, general knowledge about the subject domain, application-specific knowledge, and — of course — language-specific terminological knowledge. We consider the multifunctionality of the proposed architecture to be one of its major advantages. To illustrate this, we outline how the knowledge representation scheme, which we suggest, could be drawn upon in message generation and machine-assisted translation.