CompuTerm 2014 - 4th International Workshop on Computational Terminology (CompuTerm)

Computational Terminology covers an increasingly important aspect in Natural Language Processing areas such as text mining, information retrieval, information extraction, summarisation, textual entailment, document management systems, question-answering systems, ontology building, etc. Terminological information is paramount for knowledge mining from texts for scientific discovery and competitive intelligence. Scientific needs in fast growing domains (such as biomedicine, chemistry and ecology) and the overwhelming amount of textual data published daily demand that terminology is acquired and managed systematically and automatically; while in well established domains (such as law, economy, banking and music) the demand is on fine-grained analyses of documents for knowledge description and acquisition. Moreover, capturing new concepts leads to the acquisition and management of new knowledge.
The aim of this fourth CompuTerm workshop is to bring together Natural Language Processing researchers to discuss recent advances in computational terminology and its impact in many NLP applications. The topics addressed in this workshop are wide ranging:
term extraction, recognition and filtering, which is the core of the terminological activity that lays basis for other terminological topics and tasks;
event recognition and extraction, that extends the notion of the terminological entity from terms meaning static units up to terms meaning procedural and dynamic processes;
acquisition of semantic relations among terms, which is also an important research topic as the acquisition of semantic relationships between terms finds applications such as the population and update of existing knowledge bases, definition of domain specific templates in information extraction and disambiguation of terms;
term variation management, that helps to deal with the dynamic nature of terms, their acquisition from heterogeneous sources, their integration, standardisation and representation for a large range of applications and resources, is also increasingly important, as one has to address this research problem when working with various controlled vocabularies, thesauri, ontologies and textual data. Term variation is also related to their paraphrases and reformulations, due to historical, regional, local or personal issues. Besides, the discovery of synonym terms or term clusters is equally beneficial to many NLP applications;
definition acquisition, that covers important research and aims to provide precise and nonambiguous description of terminological entities. Such definitions may contain elements necessary for the formal description of terms and concepts within ontologies;
consideration of the user expertise, that is becoming a new issue in the terminological activity, takes into account the fact that specialized domains contain notions and terms often nonunderstandable to non-experts or to laymen (such as patients within the medical area, or bank clients within banking and economy areas). This aspect, although related to specialized areas, provides direct link between specialized languages and general language;
systematic terminology management and updating domain specific dictionaries and thesauri, that are important aspects for maintaining the existing terminological resources. These aspects become crucial because the amount of the existing terminological resources is constantly increasing and because their perennial and efficient use depends on their maintenance and updating, while their re-acquisition is costly and often non-reproducible;
monolingual and multilingual resources, that open the possibility for developing cross-lingual and multi-lingual applications, requires specific corpora, methods and tools which design and evaluation are challenging issues;
robustness and portability of methods, which allows to apply methods developed in one given context to other contexts (corpora, domains, languages, etc.) and to share the research expertise among them;
social netwoks and modern media processing, that attracts an increasing number of researchers and that provides challenging material to be processed;
utilization of terminologies in various NLP applications, as they are a necessary component of any NLP system dealing with domain-specific literature, is another novel and challenging research direction.
The workshop submissions are open to different approaches, ranging from term extraction in various languages (using verb co-occurrence, information theoretic approaches, machine learning, etc.), translation pairs extracting from bilingual corpora based on terminology, up to semantic oriented approaches and theoretical aspects of terminology. Besides, experiments on the evaluation of terminological methods and tools are also encouraged since they provide interesting and useful proof about the utility of terminological resources:
direct evaluation may concern the efficiency of the terminological methods and tools to capture the terminological entities and relations, as well as various kinds of related information;
indirect evaluation may concern the use of terminological resources in various NLP applications and the impact these resources have on the performance of the automatic systems. In this case, research and competition tracks (such as TREC, BioCreative, CLEF, CLEF-eHealth, I2B2, *SEM, and other shared tasks), provide particularly fruitful evaluation contexts and proved very successful in identifying key problems in terminology such as term variation and ambiguity.
We encourage authors to submit their research work related to various aspects of computational terminology, such as mentioned in this call. The workshop authors will be proposed to submit an extented version of their work to a special issue of an international journal or of a book collection.
Program Committee
Sophia Ananiadou, University of Manchester, National Centre for Text Mining, UK
Olivier Bodenreider, NLM, USA
Beatrice Daille, IRIN, France
Éric Gaussier, LIG, Université Joseph Fourier, France
Gregory Grefenstette, Clairvoyance Corp, France
Marie-Claude L’Homme, University of Montréal, Canada
Philippe Langlais, RALI, Canada
John McNaught, UMIST & National Centre for Text Mining, UK
Rogelio Nazar, University Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Goran Nenadic, University of Manchester, UK
Jorge Vivaldi Palatresi, University Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Selja Seppälä, University at Buffalo, USA
Karine Verspoor, NICTA, Australia
Pierre Zweigenbaum, LIMSI, France