A New Approach for Semi-Automatic Building and Extending a Multilingual Terminology Thesaurus

Abstract

This paper describes a new system for semi-automatically building, extending and managing a terminological thesaurus — a multilingual terminology dictionary enriched with relationships between the terms themselves to form a thesaurus. The system allows to radically enhance the workow of current terminology expert groups, where most of the editing decisions still come from introspection. The presented system supplements the lexicographic process with natural language processing techniques, which are seamlessly integrated to the thesaurus editing environment. The system’s methodology and the resulting thesaurus are closely connected to new domain corpora in the six languages involved. They are used for term usage examples as well as for the automatic extraction of new candidate terms. The terminological thesaurus is now accessible via a web-based application, which (a) presents rich detailed information on each term, (b) visualizes term relations, and (c) displays real-life usage examples of the term in the domain-related documents and in the context-based similar terms. Furthermore, the specialized corpora are used to detect candidate translations of terms from the central language (Czech) to the other languages (English, French, German, Russian and Slovak) as well as to detect broader Czech terms, which help to place new terms in the actual thesaurus hierarchy. This project has been realized as a terminological thesaurus of land surveying, but the presented tools and methodology are reusable for other terminology domains.