Identifying term candidates through adjective–noun constructions in English

Abstract

This paper evaluates the possibilities of recognizing term candidates through their formal and semantic characteristics. From a cognitive-linguistic stance, the semantic motivation of the word-formation patterns of collocations and compounds in domain-specific texts is assumed to promote their termhood. The semantic motivation to integrate into a multi-word unit is assumed to originate in the generally agreed on generic reference of the modifying constituent. This hypothesis is investigated empirically in a corpus-linguistic experiment. Term candidates instantiating different derivational patterns of adjective-noun constructions have been manually sorted by experts into approved and non-approved terms. Our subsequent linguistic categorization into the morpho-semantic constructions instantiated by the term candidates could be verified quantitatively in terms of relative frequencies. These frequencies clearly divide the term candidates into instances of term-promoting and term-impeding constructions. Obviously, the experts have approved the terms of those constructions which come up with a high relative frequency in the corpus.

The Polymorphic Behaviour of Adjectives in Terminography

“…A noted difficulty in this respect is to discover the degree to which the constituents are syntagmatically attracted in a domain (Kageura and Umino 1996). The greatest attraction between constituents (premodifier + head) results in lexicalized units; these are CTUs, which, as indicated by Zelinsky-Wibbelt (2012), present a tighter integration of their individual constituents than within collocations. CTUs are essential in terminology extraction as a high percentage of domain specific concepts are designated by nominal compounds (Nakagawa and Mori 2003).…”