Representing Multiword Term Variation in a Terminological Knowledge Base: a Corpus-Based Study

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 2358–2367 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 2358 Representing Multiword Term Variation in a Terminological Knowledge Base: a Corpus-Based Study Pilar León-Araúz, Melania Cabezas-García, Arianne Reimerink Department of Translation and Interpreting, University of Granada Buensuceso 11, Granada (Spain) {pleon, melaniacabezas, arianne}@ugr.es Abstract In scientific and technical communication, multiword terms are the most frequent type of lexical units. Rendering them in another language is not an easy task due to their cognitive complexity, the proliferation of different forms, and their unsystematic representation in terminographic resources. This often results in a broad spectrum of translations for multiword terms, which also foment term variation since they consist of two or more constituents. In this study we carried out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Spanish translation variants of a set of environment-related concepts by evaluating equivalents in three parallel corpora, two comparable corpora and two terminological resources. Our results showed that MWTs exhibit a significant degree of term variation of different characteristics, which were used to establish a set of criteria according to which term variants should be selected, organized and described in terminological knowledge bases. Keywords: multiword expressions and collocations, information extraction, lexical database 1. Introduction Multiword terms (MWTs) are especially inclined to term variation or the coexistence of different denominations. Rendering them in other languages is not easy because of their cognitive and structural complexity as well as their unsystematic treatment in terminographic resources. This results in a wide variety of translation solutions, which reflect a significant degree of term variation when translating MWTs. We carried out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Spanish translations of a set of 98 English environment-related MWTs and their variants, with a focus on translation variation. For this purpose, we evaluated translation equivalents in three parallel corpora, two comparable corpora and two terminological resources. The objectives of this study were the following: (1) to define a typology of term and translation variants of MWTs in the environmental domain; (2) to evaluate term variation of Spanish MWTs in different contexts (translation, bilingual or multilingual lexicography, and original production in Spanish); and (3) to propose a way of representing MWT variation in terminological knowledge bases (TKBs). Our results showed that MWTs exhibit a high degree of term variation of different characteristics, which is particularly present in translation scenarios (i.e. parallel corpora). These characteristics were used to establish a set of criteria according to which variants should be selected, organized and described in a TKB such as EcoLexicon (https://ecolexicon.ugr.es; Faber et al. 2014, San Martín et al. 2016). The rest of this article is organized as follows. Section 2 gives a brief account of term variation. Section 3 describes the resources and methodology of this study. Section 4 discusses MWT term variation in the environmental domain; and Section 5 presents a proposal for the representation of MWT variation. Finally, Section 6 lists the conclusions derived from this …

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