e-Vocabulary and e-Learning

Abstract

A vocabulary is a linguistic resource that helps manage, query and retrieve information and/or knowledge via words. If vocabularies are built and used in electronic format, they are referred as e-vocabularies. E-vocabularies have been used in Education to help teachers and students to, amongst many issues, (1) comprehend and relate the concepts and the objects of a given knowledge domain; (2) understand and learn languages, be they specialized or not; and (3) identify, describe and query knowledge and digital educational resources. Despite its utility, it is in this field where vocabularies seem to be less systematically developed, known, studied, analyzed, compared and/or linked. For this reason, we thought it was an opportunity to edit a dedicated volume with real experiences concerning the construction, use and evaluation of electronic vocabularies relating to education, and their application to the Internet and e-learning. The result is, finally, this Special Issue with five papers that represent part of the current state-of-the-art in the construction and use of e-vocabularies and education.Keywords: electronic vocabularies; education; e-learning; computational terminology; computational lexicography; digital educational resources A vocabulary is a linguistic resource that helps to manage, query, and retrieve information and/or knowledge through words (Boguraev, 1996) [1]. Some examples of vocabularies are (1) term lists; (2) glossaries; (3) classifications and taxonomies; (4) thesauri; (5) ontologies; (6) dictionaries; and (7) lexicons and lexical databases (CEN/CWA 14871:2003) [2]. All of them have been used in some way, so far, to structure knowledge in a flexible way for a number of tasks (e.g., natural language processing, conceptualization, document classification, indexing and information retrieval). The purpose of E-Vocabularies and E-learning is to find how lexicography, lexicology, terminology, and terminography have contributed and can continue to contribute to the improvement of education and e-learning. It is a difficult goal, mainly due to the specific nature of the topic and the lack of experience in joint work between specialists in these areas. However, we are persuaded that if lexical resources constitute one of the pillars of knowledge representation, their application to education constitutes a line of work that is worth exploring to improve current teaching and learning resources and strategies.With this aim in mind, five papers have been selected to be included in this issue. They approach four specific educational problems with use of e-vocabularies or with methodologies for the construction of e-vocabularies. Their quality and originality constitute a reference and an inspiration for the design of future projects that approach these or other problems in the intersection of Education and Lexicon.The first problem approached is the need, in Education, to standardise the terminology of subjects of study, particularly if teaching is provided in more than one language. In this ...