MuLex: a proposal for a legal translation-oriented TKB with graphical representation

AutoreKatia Peruzzo
CaricaL'A. è docente a contratto presso il Dipartimento di Scienze giuridiche, del linguaggio, dell'interpretazione e della traduzione dell'Università degli Studi di Trieste
Pagine251-274
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MuLex: a proposal for a legal translation-oriented TKB
with graphical representation
KATIA PE RUZZ O
SUMM ARY:1. The evolution of electronic terminological resources – 1.1. The shift
from TDBs to TKBs – 1.2. The shift from TKBs to ontologies – 1.3. The shift from
ontologies to ontological TKBs – 2. Terminological resources for legal language – 2.1.
Legal terminology and the EU – 2.2. ‘Traditional’ resources for legal terminology –
2.3. The LTS: an innovative approach toward legal terminology within the EU –
3. MuLex: a legal translation-oriented TKB – 3.1. MuLex: general features – 3.2.
Capturing multidimensionality in MuLex – 3.3. Conceptual relational structures –
3.4. Types of relations in conceptual relational structures – 4. Conclusions
1. THE E VOLUT ION O F ELE CTRO NIC T ERM INO LOGICAL R ESO URCE S
Since the early methodological and theoretical development of Termi-
nology in the 1960s, the structure and features of terminological reposito-
ries have always played a central role in terminological debates. In the early
1990s, Meyer et al. pointed out that
Much of the world’sterminological data is stored in large terminological data-
bases (TDBs) [...]. These TDBs are useful only to humans, and even then to
only a small subset of potential users: translators remain the principal user
category, even though TDBs have obvious applications in technical writing,
management information and domain learning, not to mention a wide variety
of machine uses such as information retrieval,machine translation and expert
systems1.
The same authors also acknowledge that “a growing number of termi-
nology researchers [were]calling for the evolution of TDBs into a new gen-
eration of terminological repositories that are knowledge-based”2. Nowa-
days, such repositories are generallyreferred to as ‘terminological knowledge
bases’ (TKBs), which can be assimilated to what Cabré def‌ines as “knowledge
L’A. è docente a contratto presso il Dipartimento di Scienze giuridiche, del linguaggio,
dell’interpretazione e della traduzione dell’Università degli Studi di Trieste.
1I. MEYE R, D. SKU CE, L. BOWK ER, K. ECK ,Towardsa new generation of terminological
resources: an exper iment in building a terminological knowledge base, in “Proceedings of the
14th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING ’92) (23-28 August
1992, Nantes)”, 1992, p. 956-960.
2Ibidem.
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252 Informatica e diritto /Diritto, linguaggio e tecnologie dell’informazione
repositories represented in a formal languagethat can be accessed by users via
an expert system based on terminological units, which are organised into a
conceptual network containing various types of relations”3.
1.1. The shift from TDBs to TKBs
TKBs can be considered as an evolution of TDBs. This evolution has
been possible due to the benef‌its brought by the developments experienced
more in general by linguistic resources in electronic format, especially as re-
gards the creation of dictionaries. The incorporation of large-scale, general-
language textual corpora has led to the development of a new generation of
lexicographic resources that have inf‌luenced the methodologies used in ter-
minographic tasks. These, in turn, have also started to complement with
electronically processable textual, more domain-specif‌ic corpora, ever since
the early 1990s.
Although Corpus Linguistics and the development of electronic tools for
language analysis4havebeen permeating both lexicology and terminography,
the differences in the approaches adopted and goals pursued by the two dis-
ciplines have brought about the creation of two different types of resources
containing different types of information. On the one hand, lexical reposi-
tories such as WordNet5record wordsand the existing relations among them
on a lexical basis, while on the other, TKBs are intended as repositories of
terms rather than words of the general language. Given the close connection
among terms and the underlying concepts, the relations contained in TKBs
are conceptual rather than lexical and may be exploited forthe acquisition of
knowledge of the specialised domain the terms belong to.
1.2. The shift from TKBs to ontologies
As compared to TDBs, TKBs include more specialised-domain knowl-
edge. In this regard, conceptual structuring is undeniably an essential part
3M.T.C ABRÉ,From ter minologicaldat a banks to knowledge databases: the text as the st art-
ing point, in Bowker L.(ed.), “Lexicography, terminology and translation. Text-based studies
in honour of Ingrid Meyer”, Ottawa, OttawaUniversity Press, 2006, p. 93-106.
4See C. VARGAS SIE RRA,El léxico especializado y las ontologías, in Alcaraz Varó E., Mateo
Martínez J., Yus Ramos F.(eds.), “Las lenguas profesionales y académicas”, Barcelona, Ariel,
2007, p. 41-52.
5See C. FELL BAUM,WordNet: an electronic lexical database, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1998
and P. VOSSEN (ed.), EuroWordNet: a multilingual database with lexical semantic networks,
Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998.

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