Marie-Claude L'Homme

Portability of cause–effect relation markers across specialised domains and text genres: a comparative evaluation

Lexical knowledge patterns are effective tools for identifying knowledge in corpora. As refining pattern sets is a labour-intensive and time-consuming process, re-use of patterns in subsequent research is common. The portability of patterns from one domain or corpus to another has nevertheless been questioned, although not widely evaluated. This analysis focussed on occurrences of a set of thirty-seven verbal markers of cause–effect relations in three corpora of French texts in the fields of computing, medicine and psychology. These corpora also represented two text genres: specialised and popularised/didactic. We analysed the relative frequencies of these markers and the types of relationships they expressed (specifically, those that involved a cause–effect component versus those that did not). In so doing, we aimed to evaluate and compare the markers’ occurrences with a view to shedding light on the possibilities for using markers to semi-automatically identify knowledge-rich contexts in different domai...

Terms as labels for concepts, terms as lexical units: A comparative analysis in ontologies and specialized dictionaries

Terms or terminological units are objects that are manipulated by different fields and that are at the core of several applications, e.g. representing knowledge, describing specialized usages, classifying documents. This inevitably leads to discrepancies and often large ones between resources in which terms are described and encoded e.g., ontologies, terminologies, dictionaries, thesauri. This paper attempts to characterize these differences by analyzing two different applications: 1 the elaboration of a domain ontology; and 2 the compilation of a specialized dictionary whose aim is to account for the linguistic functioning of terms. We deliberately chose two very different resources that rely on opposing methodologies hoping that this would lead to a better understanding of some of the facets terms may have and what can be expected of resources that describe them. Examples are taken from the fields of computing and the Internet. We focus more specifically on input devices. The analysis reveals that resources manipulate terms in very different ways and questions the possibility of exchanging data from one resource to the other without jeopardizing some of the principles on which they are based.

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.