INTELITERM covers topics from the area of multilingual language technology and will be underpinned by the state-of-the art Natural Language Processing methodology. It will develop a flexible and integrated tool which will address the needs of users of specialised communication and more specifically translators and interpreters. The main objective is the design and implementation of a system whose architecture is similar to an intelligent multilingual dictionary but at the same time has a modular and open structure. This intelligent terminology management system will offer a range of functionalities and will allow the user to access at his/her convenience resources which could enhance the performance of the system.
While intelligent dictionaries are regarded as an improvement against the background of lexicographical resources, their impact so far has been limited due to fact that they cover mostly general and not specialised language. The main contribution of intelligent dictionaries lies in disambiguating across 2 languages with variable degree of success. In fact, the present intelligent dictionaries including the most advanced ones such as Smarty or Terminator, are not appropriate for specialised translation as in the case of translation of biomedical or legal texts for which there is high demand.
This project has a two-fold research agenda. On the one hand, we seek to improve the functionalities of the existing intelligent dictionaries so that they can be used by non-specialists in a more efficient manner. On the other hand, drawing on the model of existing intelligent dictionaries, our aim is to develop a new generation intelligent system which will be suitable for processing and translation of specialised texts. These new generation intelligent dictionaries will be capable of offering information about terms for which they have no entry. This new functionality will be based on a novel methodology and system for multilingual extraction of terms from comparable corpora.
The results of this project will be a contribution to the development of applications and technology transfer in order to formulate, implement and evaluate new strategies for terminology management and acquisition. Finally, the project results will facilitate the exchange of specialised knowledge in a growing globalised context.