The Terminological Tools And Challenges Of Asian Languages Term Representation

Asian languages, such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) have one thing in common: they exhibit different linguistics characteristics from English and other western languages. This poses special difficulties since current term representation techniques used in English cannot be applied directly to these languages. Instead, segmentation is a first process in CJK information processing. Segmentation is a term representation technology to extract terminological information from such texts. Using the case of the Chinese language, this paper reviews the development of terminological tools and the various approaches used in segmentation. Some online resources are introduced to highlight the state of development. Acknowledging that there is a direct relationship between segmentation effectiveness and terminological tools’ quality and complexity, the paper posits that the quality of terminological tools is far been from ideal and that existing resources are far been from adequate. A number of likely trends are identified, namely, the increasing emergence of new and various kinds of electronic terminological tools (CD-ROM or online resources), commercialization of electronic terminological tools, and improved quality through standardization, compatibility and integration of terminological tools, as well as the establishment of new cooperative efforts in creating and maintaining terminological tools.