Le projet Archaeo-Term : premiers résultats
Authors: Monti Johanna , Di Buono Maria Pia , Speranza Giulia , Centrella Maria , De Carlo Andrea 
Published: September 2023

The Project Archaeo-Term: Initial Results

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 Russian, 600 in Polish, 460 in German, 193 in French, and 82 in Chinese. To conclude, the Archaeo-Term project aims at promoting the creation of high-quality and trustworthy multilingual terminological resources for the domain of archaeology by also collaborating at the same time with institutions, experts in the field of terminology, linguistics, and cultural heritage.