The LexiCon Research Group at the University of Granada has been doing research in Terminology, Lexical Semantics, Lexicography, Metaphor, Translation, and Specialized Knowledge Representation since 1994, within the context of the Lexical Grammar Model (Martín Mingorance 1984, 1989, 1995; Faber and Mairal 1999) and Cognitive Linguistics. Generally speaking, Cognitive Linguistics is an attractive linguistic paradigm for the analysis of specialized language and the terminological units that characterize it. The emphasis placed by Cognitive Linguistics on conceptual description and structure, category organization, and metaphor coincides to a certain extent with crucial areas of focus in Terminology, such as scientific ontologies, the conceptual reference of terminological units, the structure of scientific and technical domains, and specialized knowledge representation.
Over the last decade, the members of LexiCon have focused the design of specialized multilingual knowledge bases and ontologies, such as Oncoterm and EcoLexicon, which can be used as terminological and translation resources. These knowledge bases have been created using on a robust model of semantic analysis, based on the creation of lexical templates derived from corpus and dictionary analysis.
The approach applied is known as Frame-Based Terminology (Faber et al. 2006, 2007; Faber 2010). One of its basic premises is that the conceptualization of any specialized domain is goal-oriented, and depends to a certain degree on the task to be accomplished. Since a major problem in modeling any domain is the fact that languages can reflect different conceptualizations and construals, texts as well as specialized knowledge resources are used to extract a set of domain concepts. Language structure is also analyzed to obtain an inventory of conceptual relations to structure these concepts.
As a result, knowledge extraction is largely text-based. The terminological entries are composed of information from specialized texts as well as specialized language resources. Knowledge is configured and represented in a dynamic conceptual network that is capable of adapting to new contexts. At the most general level, generic roles of agent, patient, result, and instrument are activated by basic predicate meanings such as make, do, affect, use, become, etc. which structure the basic meanings in specialized texts. From a linguistic perspective, Aktionsart distinctions in texts are based on Van Valin's (2004) classification of predicate types. At the more specific levels of the network, the qualia structure of the Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky 1995) is used as a basis for the systematic classification and relation of nominal entities.
This application of this model has led to a wide range of publications, which show its usefulness in the analysis of specialized language and specialized knowledge representation.
