Terminology systematization for Cybersecurity domain in I talian Language (2019)

Abstract: This paper aims at presenting the first steps to improve the quality of the first draft of an Italian thesaurus for Cybersecurity terminology that has been realized for a specific project activity in collaboration with CybersecurityLab at Informatics and Telematics Institute (IIT) of the National Council of Research (CNR) in Italy. In particular, the paper will focus, first, on the terminological knowledge base built to retrieve the most representative candidate terms of Cybersecurity domain in Italian language, giving examples of the main gold standard repositories that have been used to build this semantic tool. Attention will be then given to the methodology and software employed to configure a system of NLP rules to get the desired semantic results and to proceed with the enhancement of the candidate terms selection which are meant to be inserted in the controlled vocabulary.

## introduction in order to develop a means for terminological knowledge base, tbk @xcite , the construction of the corpus represents the first phase, this is followed by the extraction of candidate terms and then by the construction of a relational system @xcite . for what concerns the systems on how to extract terminology, the webpage of the european parliaments gives a detailed overview of the available resources 1 . among other studies that have given a state-of-the-art on the different ways to extract information there is the analysis given by @xcite for the gold standard terms construction within a corpus-based methodology, or by @xcite for the evaluation of different terms extractors tools, or still other studies that proposed different methodology to execute terminological extraction, like @xcite or @xcite . two of the features to take into account in constructing a terminological knowledge base are accuracy and precision with respect to the contextual requirements and target genre @xcite . another key element for knowledge databases reliability is their representativeness with respect to a specific field of knowledge @xcite . according to @xcite , a semantic resource should be considered representative if it contains an adequate level of information related to the domain of reference. though a definite measurement or shared standardised calculation of the quantitative level of terms a thesaurus should have @xcite doesn't officially exist, the idea is to have as much information as possible about the domain of study. a useful method to improve the lexical richness could be that of @xcite according to which "new words will always be included in the corpus, a point is reached when the addition of more documents will not in practice bring anything new to the collection. in other words, it will not make it more representative because all the different situations, as well as the normal range of terminology in this particular field, have already been covered. ". still, not always the larger size is a signal of a good baseline for a reliable corpus @xcite . ## resources for the cyber domain the main purpose of the research activity related to the construction of a thesaurus for cybersecurity domain in italian language was that of providing a web resource able to structure the technical information proper to this area of study from a semantic point of view. in order to achieve this goal, an accurate study of the existent repositories in cybersecurity domain has been carried out. cybersecurity is a multidisciplinary field of knowledge. its terminology is highly linked to the world of information and communication technology (ict) and its sub-areas 2 , but it's also related to the legislative systems and regulations of the reference countries. for its being a combination of different fields of study, the corpus creation followed this orientation and it has been made up of documents both deriving from legal world and from sector-oriented magazines. to build up a source corpus that could include this convergence the gold standards have been gathered in order to start with a systematization of specific information. indeed, these sources, the gold standards @xcite , give a reliable content that has to be examined as to offer a comprehensive terminological database that has to be processed to create an accurate knowledge representation. the main difficulty in designing the source corpus at first was that english sources in this technical domain seemed more numerous than the italian ones, therefore a process of alignment between these two languages appeared necessary @xcite . the main gold standards that have been exploited as the starting points to evaluate the results of terms extraction are in english : nist 7298 (kisserl, 2013) and iso 27000 (2016) , and they have been manually translated to italian. the goal was to have a italian semantic resource, as well as to enhance the list of terms included in these latter standards related to cybersecurity since the collaboration with experts made evident that there was a a level of abstractness in the terminology contained in them. stating that a level of abstractness was present in the lists of terms the standards provide, means that sometimes words like "activity", "analysis" or "objective" didn't, in accordance with experts of cybersecurity domain, give an high informative additional value to the terminological structure, then not needed for guiding the domain terminology comprehension that is characterized by a marked level of technicisms. the purpose was, indeed, to provide a precise semantic source that could organize in a piloted way the terminology of this technical domain. among the italian resources used to populate the source corpus there are the glossary edited by the presidency of ministers "glossario intelligence" 3 and the guideline book about cybersecurity @xcite which has been launched in 2015 during itasec 4 conference. if the latter provides a very well-comprehensive book that explains in details the most relevant elements related to cybersecurity domain giving also examples of the key episodes occurred in years, the first is conceived as a tool that gives a list of the most important administrative and politics-oriented words 2. http://uis.unesco.org/en/glossary-term/ict-related-fields 3. https://www.sicurezzanazionale.gov.it/sisr.nsf/quaderni-di-intelligence/ glossario-intelligence.html 4. https://www.itasec.it/2018.html ## cyber corpus following the words of @xcite , "a corpus is not only a random collection of texts [...]. rather, the texts in a corpus are selected according to explicit criteria in order to be used as representative sample of a particular language or subset of that language". in order to have a set of documents that should characterize the source corpus, choosing specific parameters for selecting them it's a very important phase. linguistics of corpora @xcite suggests to take in consideration documents that are related to present age, better if they share the same time range and are all written in the same language, including produced in a same national area. the domain of cybersecurity is a field that undergoes towards continuous changes over time (condamines, 2018), and its lexicology gets involved too. having a semantic source that can monitor the terminology of a technical domain can be helpful both for common users and for experts as to follow the lexical internal system and be obliquely updated with terms modifications in time. for the realization of the italian thesaurus for cybersecurity, the hierarchy of sources in law has been followed @xcite . according to this upper level classification of reference sources from which a construction of corpora should start, the first documents to take in consideration related to the legal world, are, firstly, national, then regional and finally local. subsequently, the corpus has included divulgative documents both in digital and paper-native forms (i.e., sector oriented magazines). therefore, for the development of the source corpus for the italian thesaurus of cybersecurity, legislative datasets have firstly been taken into account. the main portals on which this kind of information has been retrieved were the european official websites where it's possible to freely download the laws of interest, i.e., eur-lex, altalex. each of these online platforms allows the selection of many filters related to the classification of legislative sources (penal, civil, administrative code), the time range, the keywords used to search inside the database. among these documents that have made up the ## methodology for the term extraction process the starting reference schematization has been that contained in the thesaurus whose terms and semantic relations have been evaluated and validated during several months of collaboration with the experts of this domain. the first draft of the italian thesaurus for cybersecurity has as its peculiarity that of having been written in italian official language, and this trait could be considered as a innovative investigation on the development of a semantic resource for organizing the information on cybersecurity field of knowledge. terms which are currently present in the italian thesaurus are partly represented by the most frequent terms given by t2k 11 term extraction and partly structured according to the information progressively given by experts during the important phase of direct collaboration. up to now, the first comparative structure to check the granularity obtained with termsuite 12 is the first draft of the italian thesaurus for cybersecurity which had been already evaluated from the experts. the terminological process started at the beginning by selecting the most frequent terms, according to tf/idf formula, among the list of terms given by the semi-automatic software extractor t2k. these terms have gone through a careful validation process with the experts of the domain with whom a selection of the preferred terms has been settled down. this paper aims at describing the further steps that anticipate the improvement of the current semantic structure of the thesaurus. the ongoing goal is, hence, to enhance the current thesaurus structure, made up of 245 terms, through the variations detected by termsuite in the source corpus and with pke library @xcite for clustering the keyphrases. in the seek of aligning the information included in the thesaurus for cybersecurity, the passages hereafter described will present : ## candidate terms observation to give an example of how different perform the two software, the following are some of the terms present in the current thesaurus, which, for instance, have already undergone through a validation process by the experts of cybersecurity domain, with their source extraction in t2k compared with termsuite. sometimes, as the first example, termsuite proved to provide a more informative result, other times, t2k gave more outputs for one entry even not grouping it in a variation cluster, or, on the contrary, it happened also that termsuite presented a result that was not present inside the t2k extracted terminology , but was very important for the experts of the domain, as the third example shows. finally an example of a new term provided by the pke clustering. ## conclusion enhancing the thesaurus terminological structure is a an ongoing perspective to be progressively achieved. termsuite extraction helped in obtaining more accurate results in terms of variants : having a list of different ways to represent a terms results to be a valid supporting system to decide, alongside the consensus of experts, the best entries with reference to accuracy and synonyms. finally, pke library with multipartite rank gives several terminological groups which can help in detecting the semantic interrelations among terms and work in future on the construction of thesaurus basic relationships by employing its collection reasoning. as well as the inclusion of new terms given by the keyphrases.