A Gold Standard for Multilingual Automatic Term Extraction from Comparable Corpora: Term Structure and Translation Equivalents

Ayla Rigouts Terryn, Véronique Hoste, Els Lefever

Abstract: Terms are notoriously difficult to identify, both automatically and manually. This complicates the evaluation of the already challenging task of automatic term extraction. With the advent of multilingual automatic term extraction from comparable corpora, accurate evaluation becomes increasingly difficult, since term linking must be evaluated as well as term extraction. A gold standard with manual annotations for a complete comparable corpus has been developed, based on a novel methodology created to accommodate for the intrinsic difficulties of this task. In this contribution, we show how the effort involved in the development of this gold standard resulted, not only in a tool for evaluation, but also in a rich source of information about terms. A detailed analysis of term characteristics illustrates how such knowledge about terms may inspire improvements for automatic term extraction.