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Technical terminology: some linguistic properties and an algorithm for identification in text

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2008

John S. Justeson  and
Slava M. Katz
John S. Justeson
Affiliation:
Department of AnthropologySUNY at AlbanyAlbany, NY 12222, USA
Slava M. Katz
Affiliation:
IBM Research DivisionT. J. Watson Research Center Yorktown Heights, NY 10598, USA
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Abstract

This paper identifies some linguistic properties of technical terminology, and uses them to formulate an algorithm for identifying technical terms in running text. The grammatical properties discussed are preferred phrase structures: technical terms consist mostly of noun phrases containing adjectives, nouns, and occasionally prepositions; rerely do terms contain verbs, adverbs, or conjunctions. The discourse properties are patterns of repetition that distinguish noun phrases that are technical terms, especially those multi-word phrases that constitute a substantial majority of all technical vocabulary, from other types of noun phrase.

The paper presents a terminology indentification algorithm that is motivated by these linguistic properties. An implementation of the algorithm is described; it recovers a high proportion of the technical terms in a text, and a high proportaion of the recovered strings are vaild technical terms. The algorithm proves to be effective regardless of the domain of the text to which it is applied.

Type
Articles
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , March 1995 , pp. 9 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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