Dissertation Information
| Title: | Contraintes sur la sélection des informations dans les définitions terminographiques : vers des modèles relationnels génériques pertinents | Add Dissertation |
| Author: | Selja Seppälä | Update Dissertation |
| Email: | click here to access email | |
| Homepage: | http://seljaseppala.wordpress.com/ | |
| Degree Awarded: | University of Geneva , Département de Traitement Informatique Multilingue | |
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Completed in:
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2012 | |
| Linguistic Subfield(s): | Computational Linguistics Semantics Text/Corpus Linguistics Lexicography | |
| Director(s): |
Bruno de Bessé
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| Abstract: |
Definitions are included in terminological resources to ensure that they
fulfill the function of conveying information about the meaning and usage of terms in the domain; they facilitate and enhance communication. The activity of definition writing is still mostly realized manually. Terminologists would however greatly benefit from the assistance of (semi-)automatic definition writing tools. Such tools would not only accelerate the process of writing definitions but also enhance the consistency and thus the overall quality of the definitions produced. The general objective of my work is thus to conceive and implement generic tools to assist in definition writing, whatever the terminographic context, the domain or the language. In my thesis, I explore more specifically the nature of dictionary definitions and of the activity of definition writing in terminology. The main research topic of my thesis relates to the selection of defining information. Typically, terminologists construct definitions using information in texts written by domain experts. However, not all the pieces of information found in these texts can be considered as defining and, when they are, not all of them are considered relevant to be included in a definition. One of the most challenging tasks of definition writing is therefore the selection of defining information. Thus, the two main questions raised by definition writing and which ought to be addressed in order to conceive and implement generic definition writing tools are the following: -What determines or influences information selection? -What types of information are relevant to defining? Considering the different factors that are acknowledged to constrain the selection of defining information, the one constraint that is, prima facie, the most independent from any domain and language is the level of reality. I therefore make the hypothesis that information selection is partly a function of the type of entity defined. If this hypothesis is verified, it is possible to propose defining models based on the properties and relations characterizing each type of entity. To test this hypothesis, I propose to adopt the categories of an existing realist upper-level ontology, the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), and their specifications. This ontology is aimed at representing the type of things that exist in the world, their properties and their relations to other types of entities. In BFO, entity types are organized according to philosophical distinctions and they are consistent with the scientific knowledge of the world. I propose to adapt these categories to creating relational models, and to use these models to describe the internal structure of existing definitions. The idea is that large-scale multi- domain and multilingual corpus analyses can be used to test the hypothesis and, if verified, to implement these models in a (semi- )automatic definition writing tool. A pilot experiment based on a corpus analysis of a sample of 240 terminological definitions extracted from 15 domains yielded encouraging results, with almost 75 % of the relations expressed in the analyzed definitions pertaining to the models associated with each entity type. This empirical study shows, moreover, which relations in these generic models are most relevant in terminological definitions. These results tend to confirm the tested hypothesis. The theoretical considerations underlying this methodological proposition also contribute to the foundations of an integrated theory of definitions in terminology. |
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