Automated Chinese terminology builder
An increase in terminology has been an indicator of rapid development in breadth and depth in any hot field (especially in science and technology disciplines). As a result, any lively discipline is bombarded with problems in standardization of terminology. It is important to make sure the terms coined are systematically created, non-ambiguous in meaning and usage and consistent with other related terms in the same domain. However, for any major language where uniformity is not a norm (e.g. Chinese as used in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), to unify the terms used within a discipline depends on the existence of a term bank in an organization where provision of guidance in usage and collection and maintenance of new terms should be its routine duties. The theme of this paper is study how to facilitate automated coinage of terminology and make it an integral part of a term bank existing on the Internet. The terminology coiner will make use of databases such as corpora of definitions of existing terminology, syntactic rule base, lexicons (technical and general), morpheme database (Yuan et al., 1994), Chinese word formation rules (Lu et al. 1977). It will consist of a parser, a syllable-based transformer (for transliteration purposes) and a coiner. The basic idea is to follow Alshawi?s idea in their LDOCE experience and work with English definitions of terms. Key words are extracted from parsing such definitions so that literal translation of English key words into Chinese can be achieved. Then the Chinese key word translations are processed in the coiner making use of Chinese morpheme database and Chinese word formation rules. The output will be alternative translations for human experts to choose from. |  |