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Terminology: Online-First Articles

Exploring terminological relations between multi-word terms in distributional semantic models

| Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès
ORCID logo | Nantes Université
ORCID logo | CNRS, Laboratoire Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie (CLLE)

A term is a lexical unit with specialized meaning in a particular domain. Terms may be simple (STs) or multi-word (MWTs). The organization of terms gives a representation of the structure of domain knowledge, which is based on the relationships between the concepts of the domain. However, relations between MWTs are often underrepresented in terminology resources. This work aims to explore distributional semantic models for capturing terminological relations between multi-word terms through lexical substitution and analogy. The experiments show that the results of the analogy-based method are globally better than those of the one based on lexical substitution and that analogy is well suited to the acquisition of synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy while lexical substitution performs best for hypernymy.

Keywords: terminology relations, multi-word terms, analogy, lexical substitution, FastText, masked language modeling, transformer models, environment domain
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Identification of semantic relations in DSMs
    • 2.1Semantic relations acquisition using DSMs
    • 2.2Semantic relation acquisition using lexical substitution
    • 2.3Analogy for semantic relation extraction
  • 3.Experimental framework
    • 3.1Main resources
      • 3.1.1Corpus
      • 3.1.2Lexical relation databases
    • 3.2Models for the lexical substitution and analogy methods
    • 3.3Distributional semantic models
    • 3.4Evaluation metrics
  • 4.Acquisition of synonymy between biterms
    • 4.1Extraction of synonymous biterms from IATE
    • 4.2Acquisition of synonymy between biterms using a masked language model
      • Test dataset for the MLM experiments
      • Experiment
      • Results
      • Qualitative analysis
    • 4.3Identification of synonymy between biterms by means of analogy
      • Test dataset for analogy
      • Experiment
      • Results
      • Qualitative analysis
  • 5.Acquiring other types of lexical relations
    • 5.1Generation of semantically related biterms by semantic projection
    • 5.2Acquiring the other lexical relations by means of masked language models
      • Test dataset used in the MLM experiments
      • Experimentation
      • Results and discussion
    • 5.3Acquiring the other semantic relations by means of analogy
      • Test dataset for analogy
      • Experiments
      • Results and discussion
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 June 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/term.21053.wan
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