Le projet Archaeo-Term: premiers résultats

This article aims at describing the objectives, the theoretical and methodological
background, the development, and the first results of the Archaeo-Term project of
the University of Naples "L'Orientale", Department of Literary, Linguistic and
Comparative Studies. The Archaeo-Term project has been developed within the
YourTermCULT project promoted by the Terminology Without Borders Project of
the Terminology Coordination Unit (TermCoord) of the European Parliament -
Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) specifically for collecting
terminology in different aspects related to culture. The aim of the Archaeo-Term
project is to enhance the access to the archaeological data in several formats and
languages. It represents a common effort to contribute to the creation of linguistic
and terminological resources for the domain of Cultural Heritage (CH) and, in
particular, for the sub-domain of archaeology, which is notably highly complex
and fragmented. One of the first results of the Archaeo-Term project is the
creation of a multilingual terminological resource for the domain of archaeology,
which can be conveniently employed in different Natural Language Processing
(NLP) tasks, including Machine Translation (MT). The first version of the
Archaeo-Term multilingual terminological resource is available in 5 languages:
Italian, English, Spanish, German, and Dutch and is publicly accessible online.
With the objective of promoting a common and shared termbase across different
languages, the Archaeo-Term terminological resource is addressed not only to a
specialized audience such as experts in the field of archaeology but also as
terminological support for translators and interpreters during their professional
practice, as well as for a more general audience. The terminological resource is
the result of an extraction and aggregation process carried out starting from two
already existing thesauri: the Italian "Thesaurus per la definizione dei reperti
archeologici" developed by the Italian Central Institute for Catalogue and
Documentation (Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione - ICCD)
and the multilingual Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) developed by the Getty
Research Institute, which is among the most trustworthy and accurate resources
in the domain of Cultural Heritage. Taking advantage of the Semantic Web
formalisms applied to these terminological resources, we are able to extract and
merge information from the aforementioned thesauri using SPARQL queries.
Indeed, we run different queries against the SPARQL endpoint to enrich our
multilingual terminological resource by extracting useful information about the
different terminological entries. The information extracted and merged from these
thesauri by means of several consecutive queries is as follows: the equivalent
terms in the foreseen languages, the alternative terms and the plural forms, the
domains and sub-domains, the definitions of the terms, and their sources.
Furthermore, the extraction phase has been followed by an evaluation step aimed
at checking missing information, verifying and adjusting possible misalignments
among entries, and setting potential future implementations. As an ongoing
project, we are also planning to enlarge the terminological resource with
equivalent terms in other languages such as French, Swedish, Polish, Russian,
and Chinese, with the aim of extending the language coverage also to non European languages which are usually under-represented and low-resourced. As a first implementation with regards to the first version of the terminological resource, we have currently collected: 1.059 entries in Italian, 1.055 in Spanish,
1.053 in English, 843 in Russi