A Methodology for developing multilingual resources for terminology

This paper presents a project that aims at building lexical resources for terminology. By lexical resources, we mean dictionaries that provide detailed lexico-semantic information on terms, i.e. lexical units the sense of which can be related to a special subject field. In terminology, there is a lack of such resources. The specific dictionaries we are currently developing describe basic French and Korean terms that belong to the fields of computer science and the Internet (e.g. computer, configure, user-friendly, Web, browse, spam). This paper presents the structure of the French and Korean articles: each component is examined and illustrated with examples. We then describe the corpus-based methodology and the different computer applications used for developing the articles. Our methodology comprises five steps: design of the corpora, selection of terms; sense distinction; definition of actantial structures and listing of semantic relations. Details on the current state of each database are also given. 1. Background and Motivations This paper presents a project that aims at building lexical resources for terminology. By lexical resources, we mean dictionaries that provide detailed lexicosemantic information on terms, i.e. lexical units the sense of which can be related to a special subject field. In terminology, there is a lack of such resources since, typically, terminological dictionaries (and even more recent resources such as ontologies) focus on the knowledge structure of specialized subject fields, thereby ignoring important linguistic properties of terms. Furthermore, we cannot entirely rely on general resources (such as WordNet or other general dictionaries in electronic form), even if they have a good coverage of terms, since they do not always capture subtle semantic distinctions that appear in specific fields of knowledge. The specific dictionaries we are currently developing describe basic French and Korean terms that belong to the fields of computer science and the Internet (e.g