Some Thoughts on Terminology and Discipline in Design

In this speculative paper, I will argue that the design community should attempt to develop a “dictionary” of the language of design, along the same lines as the Oxford English Dictionary was and is developed: as a catalogue of the living use of terms. I will sketch an outline of how such a project could be started quite easily with modern technologies. I will then consider one word in particular – “discipline” – as an example of the need for such a dictionary, by examining the various senses of the word and how even just reflecting on that can illuminate issues of clear communications. Keywords: Terminology; Lexicography; Semantics; Dictionary; Communication; Language.</p

The Evolution of Dictionaries of Economics: from a Glossary to a

Dictionaries of economics have evolved over time. In the past, most dictionaries were similar to glossaries and were in printed form. In this Internet era, some printed dictionaries have evolved into online dictionaries with various number of technological features. However, the evolution of these dictionaries has not taken into account the evolving needs and situations of the users. Consequently, as we can see from the review of the current online dictionaries of economics, these dictionaries have failed to satisfy the needs of the users, particularly the spoken text reception needs. This paper presents some principles in creating a future dictionary of economics that can satisfy the needs related to the situation when a non-native English speaker is listening to business news in the English language. The future dictionary or the proposed dictionary in this paper takes the concept of a lexicographical information system (LIS) that integrates several components into the dictionary. The four components discussed are a voice recognition function, a tooltip, an auto-summarize function, and a definition-finder. This paper shows why these four components are needed and how they can solve the users’ lexicographical problems correctly, promptly, and conveniently

Sharing Cultural Heritage: the Clavius on the Web Project

In the last few years the amount of manuscripts digitized and made available on the Web has been constantly increasing. However, there is still a considarable lack of results concerning both the explicitation of their content and the tools developed to make it available. The objective of the Clavius on the Web project is to develop a Web platform exposing a selection of Christophorus Clavius letters along with three different levels of analysis: linguistic, lexical and semantic. The multilayered annotation of the corpus involves a XML-TEI encoding followed by a tokenization step where each token is univocally identified through a CTS urn notation and then associated to a part-of-speech and a lemma. The text is lexically and semantically annotated on the basis of a lexicon and a domain ontology, the former structuring the most relevant terms occurring in the text and the latter representing the domain entities of interest (e.g. people, places, etc.). Moreover, each entity is connected to linked and non linked resources, including DBpedia and VIAF. Finally, the results of the three layers of analysis are gathered and shown through interactive visualization and storytelling techniques. A demo version of the integrated architecture was developed

A semantic-based system for querying personal digital libraries

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-28640-0_4. Copyright @ Springer 2004.The decreasing cost and the increasing availability of new technologies is enabling people to create their own digital libraries. One of the main topic in personal digital libraries is allowing people to select interesting information among all the different digital formats available today (pdf, html, tiff, etc.). Moreover the increasing availability of these on-line libraries, as well as the advent of the so called Semantic Web [1], is raising the demand for converting paper documents into digital, possibly semantically annotated, documents. These motivations drove us to design a new system which could enable the user to interact and query documents independently from the digital formats in which they are represented. In order to achieve this independence from the format we consider all the digital documents contained in a digital library as images. Our system tries to automatically detect the layout of the digital documents and recognize the geometric regions of interest. All the extracted information is then encoded with respect to a reference ontology, so that the user can query his digital library by typing free text or browsing the ontology

Medical WordNet: A new methodology for the construction and validation of information resources for consumer health

A consumer health information system must be able to comprehend both expert and non-expert medical vocabulary and to map between the two. We describe an ongoing project to create a new lexical database called Medical WordNet (MWN), consisting of medically relevant terms used by and intelligible to non-expert subjects and supplemented by a corpus of natural-language sentences that is designed to provide medically validated contexts for MWN terms. The corpus derives primarily from online health information sources targeted to consumers, and involves two sub-corpora, called Medical FactNet (MFN) and Medical BeliefNet (MBN), respectively. The former consists of statements accredited as true on the basis of a rigorous process of validation, the latter of statements which non-experts believe to be true. We summarize the MWN / MFN / MBN project, and describe some of its applications

Exploiting the similarity of non-matching terms at retrieval time

In classic information retrieval systems a relevant document will not be retrieved in response to a query if the document and query representations do not share at least one term. This problem, known as 'term mismatch', has been recognised for a long time by the information retrieval community and a number of possible solutions have been proposed. Here I present a preliminary investigation into a new class of retrieval models that attempt to solve the term mismatch problem by exploiting complete or partial knowledge of term similarity in the term space. The use of term similarity can enhance classic retrieval models by taking into account non-matching terms. The theoretical advantages and drawbacks of these models are presented and compared with other models tackling the same problem. A preliminary experimental investigation into the performance gain achieved by exploiting term similarity with the proposed models is presented and discussed

TEI and LMF crosswalks

The present paper explores various arguments in favour of making the Text Encoding Initia-tive (TEI) guidelines an appropriate serialisation for ISO standard 24613:2008 (LMF, Lexi-cal Mark-up Framework) . It also identifies the issues that would have to be resolved in order to reach an appropriate implementation of these ideas, in particular in terms of infor-mational coverage. We show how the customisation facilities offered by the TEI guidelines can provide an adequate background, not only to cover missing components within the current Dictionary chapter of the TEI guidelines, but also to allow specific lexical projects to deal with local constraints. We expect this proposal to be a basis for a future ISO project in the context of the on going revision of LMF

Extralinguistic arguments in 21st century language planning discourse: a “superdictionary” between language standardization from above and below

Language standardization has historically been a critical area of inquiry in language policy and planning (LPP) research. This is a political matter, which contributes to “more (and hierarchical) heterogeneity” rather than linguistic homogeneity (Gal 2006: 171). The paper empirically explores extralinguistic arguments, which are used by language professionals (planners, academics, educators) in mainstream media discourse. This public discourse is initiated by the launch of an Estonian “superdictionary” in 2019 (see Tavast et al. 2020), and its public reception. By using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a method, the paper also provides insight into the discursive construction of language as such and (Standard) Estonian by different LPP actors. Above all, it aims to understand the issues of power and authority in language standardization. The discourse illustrates the paradigmatic change in standardization and lexicography: from including selected language samples to the acceptance of non-elite language variants and varieties. This change has generated a polarization of stance among language professionals, and similar discursive moves, e.g., references to the past and future dangers, metaphors and other comparisons are used. Kokkuvõte. Kadri Koreinik: Keelevälised argumendid 21. sajandi keelekorraldusdiskursuses: „supersõnaraamat“ ülalt-alla ja alt-üles keelekorralduse vahel. Keele standardimist peetakse keelepoliitika ja -korraldusuuringute üheks keskseks huviobjektiks. Standardimine ehk normimine on poliitiline valik, mis selmet keelelist homogeensust luua, tekitab hoopis heterogeensust, mis on olemuselt hierarhiline: normikeelt kas osatakse või mitte (Gal 2006). Artiklis uuritakse keeleväliseid argumente, mida kasutavad peavoolumeedias normimise üle arutlemiseks keelega professionaalselt seotud inimesed (keelekorraldajad, -teadlased, haridustegelased). Uuritav diskursus lähtub nn sõnastikureformist ja selle retseptsioonist. Analüüsimeetodina kasutatakse kriitilist diskursusanalüüsi, mis võimaldab süvitsi uurida, kuidas avalikkuses konstrueeritakse keelega, sh eesti kirjakeelega seotud tähendusi. Lisaks aitab analüüs mõista võimu ja domineerimise küsimusi keele normimisel. Diskursuses kajastub paradigmaatiline muutus, mis väärtustab kasutus- ja korpuspõhist lähenemist leksikograafias, aga ka keele normimisel. Kuigi muutus on löönud „keeleinimesed“ kahte lehte, kasutatakse poolt- või vastuargumentides samu võtteid: viiteid autoriteetidele, keele ohustatusele, metafoore ja teisi võrdlusi