The first step of any terminological work is to setup a reliable, specialized corpus composed of documents written by specialists and then to apply automatic term extraction (ATE) methods to this corpus in order to retrieve a first list of potential terms. In this paper, the experiment we describe differs quite drastically from this usual process since we are applying ATE to unspecialized corpora. The corpus used for this study was built from newspaper articles retrieved from the Web using a short list of keywords. The general intuition on which this research is based is that ATE based corpus comparison techniques can be used to capture both similarities and dissimilarities between corpora. The former are exploited through a termhood measure and the latter through word embeddings. Our initial results were validated manually and show that combining a traditional ATE method that focuses on dissimilarities between corpora to newer methods that exploit similarities (more specifically distributional features of candidates) leads to promising results.

The methodology developed within the FrameNet project is being used to compile resources in an increasing number of specialized fields of knowledge. The methodology along with the theoretical principles on which it is based, i.e. Frame Semantics, are especially appealing as they allow domain-specific resources to account for the conceptual background of specialized knowledge and to explain the linguistic properties of terms against this background. This paper presents a methodology for building a multilingual resource that accounts for terms of the environment. After listing some lexical and conceptual differences that need to be managed in such a resource, we explain how the FrameNet methodology is adapted for describing terms in different languages. We first applied our methodology to French and then extended it to English. Extensions to Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese were made more recently. Up to now, we have defined 190 frames: 112 frames are new; 38 are used as such; and 40 are slightly different (a different number of obligatory participants; a significant alternation, etc.) when compared to Berkeley FrameNet.