Knowledge Management for Terminology-Intensive Applications: Needs and Tools

This paper addresses the problem of how to provide support for the acquisition, formalization, refinement, retrieval in other words, for the management of the knowledge required for producing high-quality terminology. This problem will become increasingly significant as term banks evolve into knowledge bases. Knowledge management for terminology-intensive activities is complicated by two factors: 1) the importance of encyclopedic as well as lexical-semantic knowledge, and 2) the wide spectrum of working environments in which terminological activities can be carried out, from terminology as a distinct specialization at one end of the spectrum, to terminology as practised in document-production at the other. In the first two sections of the paper, we briefly analyze each of the two complicating factors. In the third section, we describe the terminological support that is currently available and under development in a knowledge management tool called CODE, which is being used to build a prototype, knowledgebased term bank called COGNITERM, designed to be useful across a spectrum of terminology-intensive environments. . LEXICAL-SEMANTIC AND ENCYCLOPEDIC KNOWLEDGE IN T E R M I N O L O G Y Terminology is the practical discipline concerned with describing and naming concepts in specialized domains. The data produced by this process is, increasingly, stored in data bases known as term banks. Since concepts are the starting point for all practical terminology work, and since concepts are the building-blocks of knowledge, it follows that terminology is a very knowledge-intensive activity: describing concepts involves acquiring knowledge about their characteristics, and naming concepts involves matching conceptual characteristics with linguistic forms (i.e. terms). In fact, terminology is somewhat of a misnomer: most fundamentally, it is not the study of "terms", but rather of the knowledge conveyed by the terms. Given the crucial role of knowledge in terminology, one needs to address the question of what kind of knowledge to include in term banks. In the related discipline of lexicography, the same question, formulated in relation to dictionaries and lexicons, has resulted in the long-standing debate about differences between lexical-semantic (i.e. linguistic) and encyclopedic (i.e. world, extra-linguistic) knowledge (1). One viewpoint has been that dictionaries and encyclopedias should be conceived as distinct entities hence the apothegm "dictionaries are about words, encyclopedias are about things". MeaningText (MT) Lexicography (Mel'cuk 1988a/b), for example, makes a strict distinction between lexical-semantic and encyclopedic knowledge on the basis of semantic features: those which are necessary and sufficient (in the mathematical sense) to a definition are lexical-semantic, while those that are superfluous are encylopedic, and banned from