Chapter published in:
Multiple Perspectives on Terminological Variation
Edited by Patrick Drouin, Aline Francœur, John Humbley and Aurélie Picton
[Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice 18] 2017
► pp. 131–151

Chapter 6
Should we be looking for the needle in the haystack or in the straw poll?

| Observatoire de linguistique Sens-Texte, Université de Montréal
The fact that terms change in discourse is now a widely recognized fact. Writing complete terminological description of term variants is still a challenge since variation is hard to detect manually and automatically. To our knowledge, no computer-assisted methodology exists to assist the lexicographer in the quest to identify diatopic variation. In the current paper, we propose a corpus-based method that allows the automatic retrieval of terms candidate to diatopic variation. Using specialized corpora built from website of automobile manufacturers, we extract potential candidates to variation and describe a methodology for their validation using a web-based tool that provides information on diatopic variation.
Keywords: terminological variation, term variants, diatopic variation, regional variation, natural language processing
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Computer-assisted identification of terminological diatopic variation
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Corpus
    • 3.2Tools
      • 3.2.1IRaMuTeQ
      • 3.2.2Diatopix
    • 3.3Validations
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Frequency
    • 4.2Specificities
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 August 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/tlrp.18.06dro
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