Two Decades of Terminology: European Framework Programmes Titles

Two Decades of Terminology: European Framework Programmes Titles Gabriella Pardelli ⃰, Sara Goggi ⃰, Silvia Giannini ♣, Stefania Biagioni ♣ ⃰ CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, “Antonio Zampolli”, Italy ♣ CNR, Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione “A. Faedo”, Italy [gabriella.pardelli, sara.goggi]@ilc.cnr.it, [silvia.giannini, stefania.biagioni]@isti.cnr.it Abstract This work analyses a corpus made of the titles of research projects belonging to the last four European Commission Framework Programmes (FP4, FP5, FP6, FP7) during a time span of nearly two decades (1994-2012). The starting point is the idea of creating a corpus of titles which would constitute a terminological niche, a sort of “cluster map” offering an overall vision on the terms used and the links between them. Moreover, by performing a terminological comparison over a period of time it is possible to trace the presence of obsolete words in outdated research areas as well as of neologisms in the most recent fields. Within this scenario, the minimal purpose is to build a corpus of titles of European projects belonging to the several Framework Programmes in order to obtain a terminological mapping of relevant words in the various research areas: particularly significant would be those terms spread across different domains or those extremely tied to a specific domain. A term could actually be found in many fields and being able to acknowledge and retrieve this cross-presence means being able to linking those different domains by means of a process of terminological mapping. Keywords: terminology extraction; natural language processing; terminological comparison 1. Introduction and background This task of automatic extraction enabled the authors to undertake a diachronic linguistic survey over the language used for the titles of projects belonging to European Framework Programmes (FP): in this period of twenty years taken into account (1994-2012), the terminology adopted in the various fields is continuously evolving thus revealing its dynamic nature. “When we read the articles or papers of a particular domain, we can recognise some lexical items in the texts as technical terms. In a domain where new knowledge is generated, new terms are constantly created to fulfil the needs of the domain, while others become obsolete. In addition, existing terms may undergo changes of meaning…” (Kageura K., 1999). The starting point of this research dates back to a study of 2013 which was focusing on the terminology adopted within the ICT1 domain: more specifically, a map of terms distributed over the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) project titles was modelled. The first results – published in 2015 – encouraged us to plan further works: “As future work we are evaluating the possibility of extracting topic information from all the […] FP titles for designing an efficient recognition process of obsolete and new words in order to identify old and most recent fields of European research in the time span 1994-2013” (Goggi et al., 2015). The present study above all investigates the use of terms in FP4, FP5, FP6, FP7 corpora. “… corpora used to extract terminological units can be further investigated to find semantic and …

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