Following the growing interest in "corpus-based" approaches to computational linguistics, a number of studies have recently appeared on the topic of automatic term recognition or extraction. Because a successful term recognition method has to be based on proper insights into the nature of terms, studies of automatic term recognition not only contribute to the applications of computational linguistics but also to the theoretical foundation of terminology. Many studies on automatic term recognition treat interesting aspects of terms, but most of them are not well founded and described. This paper tries to give an overview of the principles and methods of automatic term recognition. For that purpose, two major trends are examined, i.e. studies in automatic recognition of significant elements for indexing mainly carried out in information retrieval circles, and current research in automatic term recognition in the field of computational linguistics. Keywords Automatic term recognition, au...

This paper considers the nature of lexical knowledge and its role in language and information processing. The lexicon is the central component of language and plays a pivotal role in current linguistic theory [3,4] and, increasingly, in natural language processing systems [5,6,7]. The lexicon embodies information about the lexical items of the language and serves as the foundation for morphologic, syntactic, and semantic processing. The differences as well as commonalities among dictionaries, thesauri, and lexicons are discussed, and distinctions between words, lexical items, and terms are drawn. Next, the scope and content of the SPECIALIST lexicon are presented, followed by a discussion of certain writing conventions that can be troublesome for text processing applications. One approach to handling orthographic and other lexical variation is discussed in a section that reports on the design and implementation of the SPECIALIST lexical programs. The paper concludes with a discussion of controlled terminologies for the medical domain. Throughout the discussion, examples are drawn from the SPECIALIST lexicon and from the other UMLS knowledge sources [8,9].

In this paper we describe linguistic models and methods, which are being developed for semi-- automatic exploitation and enriching of a large and comprehensive (existing) corpus of English mathematical key--phrases. The starting point is the need for enhanced comparison of key--phrases, meaning, among others, abstraction over intersectivity and movement of modifiers, resolution of prepositional phrase attachment (PPA) ambiguity and indeterminateness of the relations within productive compounds, and isolation of sub--phrases. All this implies the presence of a substantial amount of lexical semantic information (LSI) or LSI tagging. However, no large store of LSI is a priori available. We aim at exploiting the dependencies between the lexical characteristics of the corpus, and the conceptual structure of the domain which is described by the corpus (i.e. mathematics), in order to semi--automatically derive a lexicon in which the lexical entities are modelled to describe the conceptual str...