Automatic Incremental Term Acquisition from Domain Corpora

We describe a technique for the acquisition of terms from Italian domain text corpora, which relies both on sophisticated linguistic analysis and on statistical measures applied to linguistically processed text rather than to raw text as it is usually the case. The main advantage of this technique is that minimal a priori knowledge of term structure is required, thus allowing to explore and discover terms in a given domain without imposing a strict pattern matching structure on them, and also to easily extend it to different domains. The approach we present in this paper is incremental as it may be iterated to discover terms of increasing complexity built on top of terms discovered in the previous iteration. The reason why it is convenient to adopt such an incremental approach is that it allows to "clean" data from noise in the first step, elicitating the constituent terms, and then to refine term acquisition on "skimmed" term data.