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Lexical semantic approaches to terminology: An introduction

Article in Terminology International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication · November 2014
DOI: 10.1075/term.20.2.01int

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 Lexical semantic approaches to terminology
An introduction

Pamela Faber and Marie-Claude L’Homme

The importance of lexical semantics is increasing in terminology work. This is in

consonance with the fact that meaning is now in the spotlight. Various applica-
tions (such as Natural Language Processing and information retrieval along with
more traditional applications of terminology, i.e. specialized dictionary compila-
tion) require that the meaning of terms be represented in a way that accounts for
their behavior in text.
In the initial years of Terminology, meaning (viewed as an intrinsic property
of terms) was not given its due importance. Although the concept was the starting
point of terminological analysis (and still is in specific applications, such as ontol-
ogy development), it was defined with reference to extra-linguistic reality. In fact,
terms were not even regarded as linguistic units but merely as labels for concepts.
In other words, knowledge structures were built (often as a result of a consensus on
how knowledge should be represented), and linguistic labels were subsequently su-
perimposed on them. Hence, little attention was paid to the semantics of specialized
knowledge units. Definition formulation and analysis, if considered at all, was rel-
egated to the background and regarded as a task for experts in the specialized field.
However, methods in terminology have changed considerably since the begin-
ning of the 1990s and this has led to the proposal of new approaches. Descriptive
terminology approaches as well as the advent of corpus linguistics and corpus pat-
tern analysis have all expanded horizons and opened the door to semantic analysis
in Terminology (as reflected in the contributions in this volume). These methods
require that the linguistic facets of terms be taken into account. They also raise
many questions that previous to the 1990s, Terminology was not in a position to
answer, such as those related to (i) corpus pattern analysis; (ii) polysemy; and (iii)
multidimensionality (among others).
As is well known, corpus pattern analysis can be applied to investigate syntag-
matic criteria for distinguishing different meanings of a polysemous term. This is
particularly helpful for specifying the meaning of terms from a multidimensional

Terminology 20:2 (2014), 143–150. doi 10.1075/term.20.2.01int

issn 0929–9971 / e-issn 1569–9994 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
144 Pamela Faber and Marie-Claude L’Homme

perspective. In fact, semantic analysis has become a necessity since part of the
knowledge conveyed in specialized knowledge units is reflected in the way that
they are distributed in the text as well as in the knowledge patterns that they par-
ticipate in. In this regard, one of the premises underlying the cognitive dimension
of terminology is that language structure and lexical meaning are a manifestation
of conceptual structure (Talmy 2000). Accordingly, both general and specialized
lexical items can be regarded as conceptual categories of distinct yet related mean-
ings that exhibit typicality effects. In this regard, ontology building and conceptual
modeling can benefit from the semantic analysis of linguistic concepts, based on
sound theoretical principles. When terms are activated in texts, they set in mo-
tion a wide variety of underlying conceptual relations and knowledge structures.
Indeed, contexts are triggering mechanisms that foreground certain relations over
others (Faber and San Martín 2011; Faber 2012).
For example, lexical semantic relations such as hyponymy and meronymy re-
flect the conceptual relations of is-a and part-of, respectively. In Terminology,
semantic relations are generally studied by analyzing knowledge patterns (KPs).
As conceived by Meyer (2001), a KP refers to the lexico-syntactic patterns be-
tween the terms encoded in a proposition in texts. As reflected in recent re-
search as well as the contributions in this volume, methods for their extraction
and analysis are now a fertile area of inquiry in Terminology (Condamines 2002;
Marshman et al. 2002; Barrière 2004; Barrière and Abago 2006; Cimiano and Staab
2005). Nevertheless, despite the current popularity of knowledge patterns, Bowker
(2004) states, there are still major problems with regards to noise and silence, pat-
tern variation, anaphora, domain and language dependency, etc.
It is also true that not all relations have been analyzed to the same degree. In
this sense, non-hierarchical semantic relations of agency, cause, result, location,
etc. need to be analyzed in greater depth since they have not as yet been systemati-
cally implemented in research (Aussenac-Gilles 2000, 181). Up until now knowl-
edge patterns conveying hyponymic relations have been the most commonly stud-
ied since they play an important role in categorization and property inheritance
(Barrière 2004, 244). Nevertheless, KPs reflecting non-hierarchical semantic rela-
tions are also crucial to and enrich the conceptual representation of specialized
knowledge concepts.
Another neglected area of study in Terminology involves the specialized
knowledge units that are designated by parts of speech other than nouns, such
as adjectives or verbs. Both in the comprehension and structure of specialized
discourse across languages, verbs play an important role (Condamines 1993;
L’Homme 2002, 2003; Lerat 2002). This is due to the fact that a considerable part
of our knowledge is composed of events and states, many of which are linguisti-
cally represented by verbs (this is especially true in fields such as the environment

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 Lexical semantic approaches to terminology 145

where events are ubiquitous or technical fields where activities represent an im-
portant part of the knowledge expressed). In this sense, it can be said that verbs
set the scene for specialized concepts, which appear in the form of terms that fill
the argument slots of semantic predicates. In fact, the semantic features of these
specialized knowledge units interact with and constrain the meaning of the gen-
eral language verb to reduce polysemy and restrict it to one sense. This signifies
that terminologists must now consider how to represent predicative structures.
This also entails a major shift in representation models for terms since predicative
terms do not interact with other lexical units the way nouns denoting entities do.
In order to account for these phenomena, terminologists now refer to alter-
native frameworks. Since the beginning of the 1990s, terminologists have started
to apply lexical semantics to deal with specific facets of terminological units. In
1993, Condamines proposed a methodology to represent the syntactic and seman-
tic properties of verbs in a corpus of banking. Lerat (2002) referred to classes of
objects (“classes d’objets”) as defined by Gross (1994) to represent the argument
structure of verbs. Computational terminologists saw the potential of distribu-
tional semantics (Harris 1968) to capture semantic regularities in specialized cor-
pora automatically. Finally, Meyer (2001) referred to Cruse (1986) to define and
later identify knowledge patterns in specialized corpora.
Currently, there are a number of meaning-based linguistic frameworks that
can be and have been usefully applied to Terminology. These include (but are not
limited to) the following:
– Cognitive Semantics (Talmy 2000; Taylor 1995)
– Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1977)
– Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky 1991)
– Lexical Grammar Model (Faber and Mairal 1999)
– Meaning-text Theory, or more specifically Explanatory Combinatorial
Lexicology (Mel’čuk et al. 1995).
The contributions in this volume show that these frameworks when adapted to
terminology can provide useful insights into the linguistic behavior of terms: to
better characterize terms in the field of law (K. Perruzo), to understand the emer-
gence of neologisms (M. Sánchez Ibáñez and J. García Palacios), to discover se-
mantic relations in specialized corpora (A.-K. Schumann; E. Lefever, M. Van de
Kauter and V. Hoste), to analyze monosemy, polysemy and vagueness (A. Bertels
and D. Speelman), and finally, to study the implementation of semantic relations
in terminological resources (E. Marshman). The authors in this volume have ap-
plied these frameworks to process corpora in fields such as finance, law, mechani-
cal engineering, and medicine. They have analyzed terminological data in lan-
guages such as Dutch, French, German, Russian, Spanish.

© 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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146 Pamela Faber and Marie-Claude L’Homme

As such, lexical semantics intersects with lexicography, phraseology, corpus

linguistics, pragmatics, and knowledge representation, all of which are of vital im-
portance for Terminology.

Contributions in this volume

The articles in this special volume present innovative research work on lexical se-
mantic approaches to Terminology and Specialized Languages.
Katia Peruzzo uses a lexical semantics framework in order to describe termi-
nology in the field of law. More specifically, she devised an event template based on
Frame-based terminology, FBT (Faber et al. 2006) in order to assist terminologists
when extracting and analyzing terms related to victims of crime and their rights
(e.g., victim, pain and suffering). The template — designed with the assistance of
an expert — represents a prototypical event where a crime victim (the Patient) is
subjected to an action performed by an offender (an Agent), which is classified
as criminal conduct according to the relevant legal system and has consequences
(e.g. harm, suffering, damage to property) for the victim. Rights and remedies are
also present in the event template. The template then guides terminologists when
exploring the corpus, since they will look for terms that are relevant with regard to
the template and collect information on these terms.
Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez and Joaquín García Palacios explore a phenomenon
they call terminological dependency whereby a language (in this case Spanish) im-
ports denominations from another one (English) in specialized fields. The authors
propose a semantic characterization in order to identify traces of this dependency
in formal neologisms extracted from a corpus of texts on Alzheimer’s disease. The
authors first divide neologisms according to the concepts they designate (based
on Sager’s (1990) and Kageura’s (2002) classifications). The semantic features of
neologisms are then analyzed (this part of the study is based on Pustejovsky’s
(1991) Generative Lexicon model (the authors analyzed the argument, event, qua-
lia structures associated to neologisms as well as inheritance). This analysis allows
the authors to establish links between some semantic properties of terms associ-
ated with specific conceptual classes and cases of terminological dependency.
In her article, Anne-Kathrin Schumann explores the relationship between
knowledge and meaning, and more specifically how knowledge is expressed in
running text. Her analysis contributes to methods for identifying contexts that
are useful for terminology work. “Knowledge-rich contexts” (KRCs), an expres-
sion coined by Meyer (2001), correspond to those statements in which a semantic
relation between terms is expressed or a definitional information is provided on
a specific term. The objective sought by the author is to characterize the linguistic

© 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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 Lexical semantic approaches to terminology 147

properties of KRCs in German and Russian corpora, assuming that a cross-lin-

guistic analysis will provide evidence to generalize at least part of these properties.
Properties such as parts of speech typically found in KRCs, typical and non-typical
lexical units, syntactic features of verbs found in patterns, are investigated both
qualitatively and quantitatively. This work can help refine existing typologies of
patterns used to locate knowledge-rich contexts and perhaps facilitate their man-
ual or automatic extraction.
Elizabeth Marshman is also interested in relations between terms, but from
the point of view of their integration in terminological resources and users’ reac-
tions to the addition of information on terminological relations. The author de-
veloped a prototype resource called CREATerminal that presents information on
relations in the form of knowledge-rich contexts, KRCs (Meyer 2001) in English
and in French. The contexts were extracted from corpora dealing with breast can-
cer; contexts expressing relations of cause-effect, generic-specific, part-whole and
entity-function were collected. The contexts, the terms that share one of these rela-
tions along with the pattern linking them are stored in a database that users can
explore. The terminal was then submitted to an evaluation by students in trans-
lation. Results indicate that students react positively to this kind of addition to
terminological resources.
Els Lefever, Marjan Van de Kauter, and Véronique Hoste explore semantic
relations (more specifically hypernymy) and tested different methods to identify
instances of the relations in Dutch and English specialized corpora automatical-
ly. The method — called HypoTerm — consists in extracting terms and named
entities, then identifying hypernymic relations for these linguistic entities. The
detection of relations can be performed using three techniques: a pattern-based
approach (similar to the well-known technique developed by Hearst in 1992), a
morpho-syntactic analyzer and a distributional model. These relation identifica-
tion techniques were evaluated against a corpus annotated manually and results
show that they yield satisfactory results (with some variation between Dutch in
English and according the approach tested). When fully automated, the HypoTerm
method could help enrich term terminological resources, such as term banks and
increase their coverage.
Ann Bertels and Dirk Speelman apply distributional semantics (based on
the hypothesis that the words with similar meanings will have the same distribu-
tion (Harris (1968)) to investigate semantic similarity (monosemy, polysemy and
vagueness) in specialized corpora. They developed a technique that exploits co-
occurrence patterns with statistical measures and represents distance from and
proximities to a node using Multidimensional Scaling (MDS). In their article, the
authors apply the technique to a French corpus of machining. They present and
discuss results that were obtained when applying these techniques to corpora of

© 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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148 Pamela Faber and Marie-Claude L’Homme

different sizes and to word forms vs. lemmas. Results indicate that, even within a
specific field of knowledge, subcorpora can display differences. They also indicate
that lemmas lead to more coherent semantic interpretation as far as the MDS rep-
resentation is concerned.
The research carried out by the authors in this volume opens up promising av-
enues of inquiry. Their innovative proposals address complex problems in termi-
nology, and provide the groundwork for further studies linking lexical semantics
and terminology.
To conclude, we would like to thank the members of the scientific committee
who spent valuable time reviewing the papers that were submitted to this special
issue.
– Guadalupe Aguado, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
– Pierrette Bouillon, École de traduction et d’interprétation, Université de
Genève, Switzerland
– Beatrice Daille, LINA, Université de Nantes, France
– Kyoko Kanzaki, Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan
– François Lareau, Observatoire de linguistique Sens-Texte (OSLT), Montréal,
Canada
– Pilar León-Arauz, Universidad de Granada, Spain
– Patrick Leroyer, Centlex, Aarhus University, Denmark
– Ricardo Mairal, UNED, Madrid, Spain
– François Maniez, CRTT, Université de Lyon, France
– Elizabeth Marshman, University of Ottawa, Canada
– Silvia Montero, University of Granada, Spain
– Janine Pimentel, Departamento de Letras, Universidade Pontifícia Católica do
Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil
– Alain Polguère, Université de Lorraine & ATILF CNRS
– Margaret Rogers, University of Surrey, UK
– Juan Sager, Manchester, UK
– Zuoyan Song, Beijing Normal University, China
– Carlos Subirats, Universidad de Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain
– Rita Temmerman, Applied Linguistics Department of Vrije Universiteit
Brussel, Belgium
– Maribel Tercedor, University of Granada, Spain

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 Lexical semantic approaches to terminology 149

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