Predicting the difficulty of domain-specific vocabulary is an important task towards a better understanding of a domain, and to enhance the communication between lay people and experts. We investigate German closed noun compounds and focus on the interaction of compound-based lexical features (such as frequency and productivity) and terminology-based features (contrasting domain-specific and general language) across word representations and classifiers. Our prediction experiments complement insights from classification using (a) manually designed features to characterise termhood and compound formation and (b) compound and constituent word embeddings. We find that for a broad binary distinction into ‘easy’ vs. ‘difficult’ general-language compound frequency is sufficient, but for a more fine-grained four-class distinction it is crucial to include contrastive termhood features and compound and constituent features.

While automatic term extraction is a well-researched area, computational approaches to distinguish between degrees of technicality are still understudied. We semi-automatically create a German gold standard of technicality across four domains, and illustrate the impact of a web-crawled general-language corpus on technicality prediction. When defining a classification approach that combines general-language and domain-specific word embeddings, we go beyond previous work and align vector spaces to gain comparative embeddings. We suggest two novel models to exploit general- vs. domain-specific comparisons: a simple neural network model with pre-computed comparative-embedding information as input, and a multi-channel model computing the comparison internally. Both models outperform previous approaches, with the multi-channel model performing best.

We present a dataset with difficulty ratings for 1,030 German closed noun compounds extracted from domain-specific texts for do-it-ourself (DIY), cooking and automotive. The dataset includes two-part compounds for cooking and DIY, and two- to four-part compounds for automotive. The compounds were identified in text using the Simple Compound Splitter (Weller-Di Marco, 2017); a subset was filtered and balanced for frequency and productivity criteria as basis for manual annotation and fine-grained interpretation. This study presents the creation, the final dataset with ratings from 20 annotators and statistics over the dataset, to provide insight into the perception of domain-specific term difficulty. It is particularly striking that annotators agree on a coarse, binary distinction between easy vs. difficult domain-specific compounds but that a more fine grained distinction of difficulty is not meaningful. We finally discuss the challenges of an annotation for difficulty, which includes both the task description as well as the selection of the data basis.

We perform a comparative study for automatic term extraction from domain-specific language using a PageRank model with different edge-weighting methods. We vary vector space representations within the PageRank graph algorithm, and we go beyond standard co-occurrence and investigate the influence of measures of association strength and first- vs. second-order co-occurrence. In addition, we incorporate meaning shifts from general to domain-specific language as personalized vectors, in order to distinguish between termhood strengths of ambiguous words across word senses. Our study is performed for two domain-specific English corpora: ACL and do-it-yourself (DIY); and a domain-specific German corpus: cooking. The models are assessed by applying average precision and the roc score as evaluation metrices.

We introduce SURel, a novel dataset with human-annotated meaning shifts between general-language and domain-specific contexts. We show that meaning shifts of term candidates cause errors in term extraction, and demonstrate that the SURel annotation reflects these errors. Furthermore, we illustrate that SURel enables us to assess optimisations of term extraction techniques when incorporating meaning shifts.

We perform an interdisciplinary large-scale evaluation for detecting lexical semantic divergences in a diachronic and in a synchronic task: semantic sense changes across time, and semantic sense changes across domains. Our work addresses the superficialness and lack of comparison in assessing models of diachronic lexical change, by bringing together and extending benchmark models on a common state-of-the-art evaluation task. In addition, we demonstrate that the same evaluation task and modelling approaches can successfully be utilised for the synchronic detection of domain-specific sense divergences in the field of term extraction.

Automatic term identification and investigating the understandability of terms in a specialized domain are often treated as two separate lines of research. We propose a combined approach for this matter, by defining fine-grained classes of termhood and framing a classification task. The classes reflect tiers of a term’s association to a domain. The new setup is applied to German closed compounds as term candidates in the domain of cooking. For the prediction of the classes, we compare several neural network architectures and also take salient information about the compounds’ components into account. We show that applying a similar class distinction to the compounds’ components and propagating this information within the network improves the compound class prediction results.

This paper introduces a new dataset of term annotation. Given that even experts vary significantly in their understanding of termhood, and that term identification is mostly performed as a binary task, we offer a novel perspective to explore the common, natural understanding of what constitutes a term: Laypeople annotate single-word and multi-word terms, across four domains and across four task definitions. Analyses based on inter-annotator agreement offer insights into differences in term specificity, term granularity and subtermhood.

Feature design and selection is a crucial aspect when treating terminology extraction as a machine learning classification problem. We designed feature classes which characterize different properties of terms based on distributions, and propose a new feature class for components of term candidates. By using random forests, we infer optimal features which are later used to build decision tree classifiers. We evaluate our method using the ACL RD-TEC dataset. We demonstrate the importance of the novel feature class for downgrading termhood which exploits properties of term components. Furthermore, our classification suggests that the identification of reliable term candidates should be performed successively, rather than just once.

This paper presents a novel gold standard of German noun-noun compounds (Ghost-NN) including 868 compounds annotated with corpus frequencies of the compounds and their constituents, productivity and ambiguity of the constituents, semantic relations between the constituents, and compositionality ratings of compound-constituent pairs. Moreover, a subset of the compounds containing 180 compounds is balanced for the productivity of the modifiers (distinguishing low/mid/high productivity) and the ambiguity of the heads (distinguishing between heads with 1, 2 and >2 senses