Surface Grammatical Analysis For The Extraction Of Terminological Noun Phrases

LEXTER is a software package for extracting terminology. A corpus of French language texts on any subject field is fed in, and LEXTER produces a list of likely terminological units to be submitted to an expert to be validated. To identify the terminological units, LEXTER takes their form into account and proceeds in two main stages : analysis, parsing. In the first stage, LEXTER uses a base of rules designed to indentify frontier markers in view to analysing the texts and extracting maximal-length noun phrases. In the second stage, LEXTER parses these maximal-length noun phrases to extract subgroups which by virtue of their grammatical structure and their place in the maximal-length noun phrases are likely to be terminological units. In this article, the type of analysis used (surface grammatical analysis) is highlighted, as the methodological approach adopted to adapt the rules (experimental approach). I) Constituting Constituting a terminology of a subject field, that is to say establishing a list of the terminological units that represent the concepts of this field, is an oft-encountered problem. For the Research Development Division of Electricit6 de France (French Electricity Board), this problem arose in the information documentation sector. An automatic indexing system, using different thesauri according to the application, has been operational for three years or more [Monteil 1990]. The terminologists and information scientists need a terminology a terminology extraction tool in order to keep these thesauri up to date in constantly changing fields and to create "ex nihilo" thesauri for new fields. This is the reason why the terminological extracting software, LEXTER, was developed, forming the first link in the chain that goes to make up the thesaurus. A corpus of french-language texts is fed into LEXTER, which gives out a list of likely terminological units, which are then passed on to art expert for validation.