Following the growing interest in corpus-based approaches to computational linguistics, a number of studies have recently appeared on the topic of automatic term recognition or extraction. Because a successful term-recognition method has to be based on proper insights into the nature of terms, studies of automatic term recognition not only contribute to the applications of computational linguistics but also to the theoretical foundation of terminology. Many studies on automatic term recognition treat interesting aspects of terms, but most of them are not well founded and described. This paper tries to give an overview of the principles and methods of automatic term recognition. For that purpose, two major trends are examined, i.e. studies in automatic recognition of significant elements for indexing mainly carried out in information-retrieval circles and current research in automatic term recognition in the field of computational linguistics.