A probabilistic framework for automatic term recognition

Term recognition identifies domain-relevant terms which are essential for discovering domain concepts and for contributing to the construction of terminologies required by a wide range of natural language applications. Numerous techniques have been developed in an attempt to numerically determine or quantify termhood based on term characteristics. Some of the apparent shortcomings of existing techniques are the ad-hoc combination of termhood evidence, mathematically-unfounded derivation of scores and implicit assumptions concerning term characteristics. We propose a probabilistic framework for formalising and combining qualitative evidence based on explicitly defined term characteristics to produce a new termhood measure. Our qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate consistently better precision, recall and accuracy compared to three other existing ad-hoc measures.