On the Formal Standardization of Terminology Resources: The Case Study of TriMED

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 4903–4910 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 4903 On the Formal Standardization of Terminology Resources: The Case Study of TriMED F. Vezzani1, G. M. Di Nunzio2,3 1Dept. of Linguistic and Literary Studies, 2Dept. of Information Engineering, 3Dept. of Mathematics University of Padua, Italy federica.vezzani@phd.unipd.it, giorgiomaria.dinunzio@unipd.it Abstract The process of standardization plays an important role in the management of terminological resources. In this context, we present the work of re-modeling an existing multilingual terminological database for the medical domain, named TriMED. This resource was conceived in order to tackle some problems related to the complexity of medical terminology and to respond to different users’ needs. We provide a methodology that should be followed in order to make a termbase compliant to the three most recent ISO/TC 37 standards. In particular, we focus on the definition of i) the structural meta-model of the resource, ii) the data categories provided, and iii) the TBX format for its implementation. In addition to the formal standardization of the resource, we describe the realization of a new data category repository for the management of the TriMED terminological data and a Web application that can be used to access the multilingual terminological records. Keywords: terminology standardization, medical language, methodologies for LRs construction. 1. Introduction Terminology standardization has long been known as a fun- damental requirement in dealing with special languages (W¨uster, 1971; Galinski and Nedobity, 1988; Sager, 1998). This process reflects on two aspects related to terminology, as the study of the “micro-language” used by specialists in particular domains of the human activity (Balboni, 2000). Firstly, from a semantic perspective, the standardization of terminology consists in dealing with the meaning of terms. This process aims to 1) create a shared common consensus on the use of technical terms among a community of ex- perts, and 2) disambiguate their meaning to the advantage of monoreferentiality (a term has a single referent in the real world) and monosemy (a term has a single and univo- cal meaning) (Magris et al., 2002). The importance of this aspect is reflected in such contexts where the transmission of information is “vital”. Communication in the healthcare domain, for example, is often characterized by an opaque lexicon which needs to be disambiguated (Rouleau, 2003; Castro et al., 2007). Secondly, from a formal perspective, the standardization of terminology, interpreted in this context as a collection of terminological data, reflects on the organization of struc- tured data for linguistic resources. To this purpose, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO),1 and in particular the Technical Committee ISO/TC 37 work- ing on Language and Terminology, provides a large num- ber of standards for “language resource management” (sub- committee 4) and “management of terminology resources” (sub-committee 3). One of the main goal is to provide struc- tured and standardized terminological data which can be reused in different terminology management systems. This aspect is important not only for the correct …

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