A step towards the detection of semantic variants of terms in technical documents

A step towards the detection of semantic variants of terms in technical documents Thierry Hamon and Adeline Nazarenko C~cile Gros Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris-Nord EDF-DER-IMA-TIEM-SOAD Universit~ Paris-Nord Avenue J-B Clfiment 93430 Villetaneuse, FRANCE thierry.hamon~lipn.univ-paris 13.fr adeline.nazarenko~lipn.univ-paris 13.fr 1 Avenue du GSnSral de Gaulle 92141 Clamart CEDEX, FRANCE cecile.gros~der.edfgdf.fr Abstract This paper reports the results of a preliminary experiment on the detection of semantic vari- ants of terms in a French technical document. The general goal of our work is to help the struc- turation of terminologies. Two kinds of seman- tic variants can be found in traditional termi- nologies : strict synonymy links and fuzzier re- lations like see-also. We have designed three rules which exploit general dictionary informa- tion to infer synonymy relations between com- plex candidate terms. The results have been examined by a human terminologist. The ex- pert has judged that half of the overall pairs of terms are relevant for the semantic variation. He validated an important part of the detected links as synonymy. Moreover, it appeared that numerous errors are due to few mis-interpreted links: they could be eliminated by few exception rules. 1 Introduction 1.1 Structuring a terminology The work presented here is a part of an indus- trial project of Technical Document Consulta- tion System (Gros et al., 1996) at the French electricity company EDF. The goal is to develop tools to help a terminologist in the construction of a structured terminology (cf. figure 1) pro- viding : • terms of a domain, i.e. simple or com- plex lexical units pointing out accurate con- cepts in a technical document, (Bourigault, 1992); • semantic links such as the see-also relation. This can be viewed as a two-step process. The candidate terms (i.e. lexical units which can be terms if a domain expert validates them) are first automatically extracted from the technical document with a Terminology Extraction Soft- ware (LEXTER) (Bourigault, 1992). The list of candidate terms is then structured into a se- mantic network. We focus on the latter point by detecting semantic variants, especially syn- onyms. ligne afirienne (overhead line) See_also : D@art a~rien (overhead outlet) Synonym : Liaison 51ectrique afirienne (overhead electric link) Ligne simple (single circuit line) Is_a : Ligne aSrienne (overhead line) Ligne multiterne (multiple circuit line) Is_a : Ligne a~rienne (overhead line) Synonym : Ligne double (double circuit line) Figure 1: Example of a structured terminology in the electric domain. In order to build a structured terminology, we thus attempt to link candidate terms ex- tracted from a French technical document 1. For instance, from synonyms such as matgriel (equipment) / Cquipement (fittings), marche (running) / fonctionnement (working) and nor- mal (normal) / bon (right), we infer a synonymy link between candidate terms materiel glec- trique (electric equipment) / iquipement dlec- trique (electrical fittings) and marche normale (normal running) / bon fonctionnement (right working). 1As the terms used in this paper have been extracted from French documents, their translation, especially for the synonymy, does not always show the same …

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