Some Statistical Characterisations of Terminological and Non-terminological Ele- Ments: Evaluation and Examination in Japanese Technical Abstracts

1 Introduction Corpus-based, quantitative approaches are important to the study of terminology , because terms are, unlike words, elements which can only be recognised at the level of language fact (Kageura 1995). Despite this, the only work which takes this approach is automatic term recognition Most of the simple and straightforward quantitative characterisations of terms have already been pursued in ATR work. All ATR methods perform reasonably well, but not completely satisfactorily. In addition, we do not know which method really is better. One reason for this is that ATR work has not clariied its real target. Is it attempting to recognise all the terms in a document, in a corpus, or in a eld, or a representative subset? Our standpoint is that the principal target of quantitative terminological study, either theoretical or practical, should be a terminology of at least one domain as a whole, and not individual terms or arbitrary set of terms appearing in a given corpus. In this paper, we initially consider the validity of some quantitative character-isations of terminological elements in Japanese technical abstracts, based on a few basic viewpoints used in existing ATR and automatic indexing work. Then we examine the meaning and theoretical position of this type of approach, and argue for the necessity of clearer and more integrated approach to the statistical modelling of terminology.