Rule-based Automatic Multi-word Term Extraction and Lemmatization

In this paper we present a rule-based method for multi-word term extraction that relies on extensive lexical resources in the form of electronic dictionaries and finite-state transducers for modelling various syntactic structures of multi-word terms. The same technology is used for lemmatization of extracted multi-word terms, which is unavoidable for highly inflected languages in order to pass extracted data to evaluators and subsequently to terminological e-dictionaries and databases. The approach is illustrated on a corpus of Serbian texts from the mining domain containing more than 600,000 simple word forms. Extracted and lemmatized multi-word terms are filtered in order to reject falsely offered lemmas and then ranked by introducing measures that combine linguistic and statistical information (C-Value, T-Score, LLR, and Keyness). Mean average precision for retrieval of MWU forms ranges from 0.789 to 0.804, while mean average precision of lemma production ranges from 0.956 to 0.960. The evaluation showed that 94% of distinct multi-word forms were evaluated as proper multi-word units, and among them 97% were associated with correct lemmas.