Cultural Context and Multimodal Knowledge Representation: Seeing the Forest for the Trees

Context, especially cultural context, has long been neglected in Terminology. Even though recent approaches have acknowledged the relevance of culture in specialized communication, the development of culture in Terminology is still marginal. Culture is also underrepresented in terminological resources, which may respond to the complexity of reflecting the cultural component in the description of terms and concepts. However, conceptualization is dynamic and changes from culture to culture and, for that reason, an in-depth study on how the nature of human perception and cultural cognition influences the representation of concept systems and terms in specialized knowledge contexts is needed. Furthermore, to facilitate knowledge acquisition, contextual and conceptual information should go together with multimodal information, as the combination of textual and visual material improves understanding. This study integrates different types of context (i.e., semantic relations, frames, and culture) to describe a methodology for the selection and representation of multimodal information for culturally bound concepts such as forest in terminological knowledge bases, based on the theoretical premises of Frame-Based Terminology. Different ideas of forest in European countries were analyzed and represented by means of culturally adapted images, which are best suited to disseminate knowledge and foreground the role of culture in specialized communication.Ministry of Science and Innovation, Spain (MICINN) Spanish Government PID2020118369GB-I00European Commission A-HUM-600-UGR2

Conceptual multidimensionality in medical translation

En la comunicación científica, la selección de un término suele conllevar que se resalte una característica más o menos prototípica del concepto, una intención en el emisor o una dimensión del concepto. En la comunicación interlingüística y a menudo intercultural que entraña la traducción en ámbitos biosanitarios, prestar atención a estas dimensiones es importante para que el producto cumpla con las expectativas del receptor meta. El proyecto VARIMED (FFI2011-23120) se plantea estudiar la motivación cognitiva que existe en la selección léxica de distintas formas para dar nombre a conceptos médicos de cara a establecer la presencia de una sistematización en dicha motivación. En este artículo abordaremos estas características desde la descripción de los objetivos del proyecto y la metodología seguida en el mismo.In scientific communication, selecting a term often means highlighting a more or less prototypical feature of a concept, revealing an intention from the issuer or even a certain facet of the concept. It is particularly important to pay due attention to such facets or conceptual dimensions in the process of interlinguistic and intercultural mediation implied by biomedical translation so that the text matches the target audience expectations. The project VariMed (FFI2011-23120) attempts to study the cognitive motivation underlying the lexical selection of different denominative variants for medical concepts in order to find patterns which explain the causes or motivation for terminological variation. This paper deals with the communicative and cognitive motivation from the point of view of the objectives and the methodology followed in VariMed

Extraction of terms highly associated with named rivers

EcoLexicon is an electronic, multilingual, terminological knowledge base on environmental sciences, whose flexible design permits the contextualization of data so that they are more relevant to specific subdomains and geographic areas. However, to facilitate the geographic contextualization of concepts such as those belonging to the semantic category of LANDFORM, it is necessary to know what terms are semantically related to each type of landform according to the research papers published by experts, and how those terms are related to each other. This paper describes a semi-automatic method for extracting knowledge about terms related to rivers as a type of landform, from a specialized corpus of English Environmental Science texts. A GeoNames database dump was first applied to automatically match the sequences of words in the corpus which are the proper names of rivers. For all the named rivers recognized in the corpus, their respective geographic coordinates, i.e. longitude and latitude, were automatically retrieved from the GeoNames database dump and then automatically visualized on top of a static map. This type of visualization accounted for the representativeness of the corpus in reference to the location of rivers and the number of times that they were mentioned. Moreover, a hierarchical clustering technique was deployed in order to group the named rivers, based on their latitude and longitude. This allowed us to automatically annotate each river with the geographical area it belongs to. For each river, the contexts in which it appeared were automatically retrieved in such a way that all the contexts contained complete sentences. Subsequently, the subcorpus of contexts was lemmatized. The multi-word terms, automatically collected from EcoLexicon, were automatically matched in the corpus and joined with underscores. Then, a document term matrix of co-occurrences was obtained, and the terms in the columns transformed into binary variables. Finally, the clustering technique ROCK for categorical variables was adopted to group the named rivers, based on the terms related to them, as reflected in the corpus data. The preliminary results show that there is a slight association between the geographical areas of the named rivers and the processes mentioned by researchers affecting them. Once these experimental results were validated by Coastal Engineering experts, the knowledge extracted with this method facilitates the geographical contextualization of EcoLexicon with regard to rivers, in the sense that a specific named river can be linked to its more highly associated terms dealt with in the corpus data

Applying Ontologies to Terminology: Advantages and Disadvantages

This paper aims at discussing the main advantages that ontologies bring to the field of terminology and its users, focusing on different aspects and needs. Throughout the paper ontologies are acknowledged as a valuable resource to improve quality of terminological projects as well as the content of terminologies, but it also seems appropriate to define the concept of ontologies more precisely and to outline their benefits and limitations. To do so, we firstly discuss the multidisciplinarity of ontologies and the main recent uses within different disciplines. Secondly, we focus on terminology studies and theories and depict the evolution of this resource in the terminology field during the last decades, which has brought about the appearance of new methodologies and applications. Next, we put forward the advantages that ontologies bring to terminology in general and to several linguistic phenomena in particular (multidimensionality, for example) so as to shed some light on their importance in this field and, finally, we conclude with the discussion of significant drawbacks encountered, along with some final remarks about the use of ontologies in terminology work

TOTh 2011 Proceedings - Terminology & Ontology: Theories and applications

International audienceAvant-proposLa Terminologie est un domaine scientifique par nature pluridisciplinaire. Elle puise, entre autres, à la linguistique, la théorie de la connaissance, la logique. Pour que cette diversité soit une richesse, il faut lui offrir un cadre approprié au sein duquel elle puisse s’exprimer et s’épanouir : c’est une des raisons d’être des Conférences TOTh. Dans ce contexte, la formation et la transmission des connaissances jouent un rôle essentiel. La Formation TOTh, programmée sur un jour et demi précédant la conférence, se déroule depuis 2011 sur deux années consécutives dédiées pour l’une à la dimension linguistique et pour l’autre à la dimension conceptuelle de la terminologie, deux dimensions intimement liées. La Disputatio, introduite à partir de cette année, renoue avec une forme d’enseignement et de recherche héritée de la scolastique. Elle vise, à travers une lecture commentée effectuée par un membre du comité scientifique, à donner accès à des textes jugés fondateurs de notre domaine, trop souvent oubliés voire ignorés.La cinquième édition des Conférences TOTh a également été l’occasion de mettre en place un Prix « Jeune chercheur ». Décerné par le comité scientifique lors de la conférence, il récompense le travail soumis à TOTh d’un de nos jeunes collègues. Notre collègue Michele Prandi, professeur à l’Università degli Studi di Genova, a ouvert la Conférence TOTh 2011 par un exposé passionnant sur : « Signes, signifiés, concepts : pour un tournant philosophique en linguistique ». Le ton était donné.Ont suivi douze communications (hors conférence d’ouverture et disputatio) réparties sur deux jours en six sessions animées par différents présidents. Elles ont permis d’aborder en profondeur – chaque intervention dure au minimum 45 minutes – de nombreux sujets tant théoriques que pratiques rappelant qu’il ne peut y avoir de terminologie sans langue de spécialité ni savoir spécialisé.Les douze communications, équitablement réparties sur les deux langues officielles de la conférence et provenant de sept pays différents, confirment l’audience internationale acquise aujourd’hui par TOTh.Avant de vous souhaiter bonne lecture de ces actes, j’aimerais terminer en remerciant tous les participants de TOTh 2011 pour la richesse des débats et des moments partagés. Christophe RochePrésident du comité scientifiqu

Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Ecological Informatics: translating ecological data into knowledge and decisions in a rapidly changing world: ICEI 2018

The Conference Proceedings are an impressive display of the current scope of Ecological Informatics. Whilst Data Management, Analysis, Synthesis and Forecasting have been lasting popular themes over the past nine biannual ICEI conferences, ICEI 2018 addresses distinctively novel developments in Data Acquisition enabled by cutting edge in situ and remote sensing technology. The here presented ICEI 2018 abstracts captures well current trends and challenges of Ecological Informatics towards: • regional, continental and global sharing of ecological data, • thorough integration of complementing monitoring technologies including DNA-barcoding, • sophisticated pattern recognition by deep learning, • advanced exploration of valuable information in ‘big data’ by means of machine learning and process modelling, • decision-informing solutions for biodiversity conservation and sustainable ecosystem management in light of global changes

Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Ecological Informatics: translating ecological data into knowledge and decisions in a rapidly changing world: ICEI 2018

The Conference Proceedings are an impressive display of the current scope of Ecological Informatics. Whilst Data Management, Analysis, Synthesis and Forecasting have been lasting popular themes over the past nine biannual ICEI conferences, ICEI 2018 addresses distinctively novel developments in Data Acquisition enabled by cutting edge in situ and remote sensing technology. The here presented ICEI 2018 abstracts captures well current trends and challenges of Ecological Informatics towards: • regional, continental and global sharing of ecological data, • thorough integration of complementing monitoring technologies including DNA-barcoding, • sophisticated pattern recognition by deep learning, • advanced exploration of valuable information in ‘big data’ by means of machine learning and process modelling, • decision-informing solutions for biodiversity conservation and sustainable ecosystem management in light of global changes