Textual genre based approach to use W ord N et in language-for-specific-purpose classroom as dictionary (2019)

Abstract: When teaching language for specific purposes (LSP) linguistic resources are needed to help students understand and write specialised texts. As building a lexical resource is costly, we explore the use of wordnets to represent the terms that can be found in particular textual domains. In order to gather the terms to be included in wordnets, we propose a textual genre approach, that leads us to introduce a new relation term used in to link all the possible terms/synsets that can appear in a text to the synset of the textual genre. This way, students can use wordnet as dictionary or thesaurus when writing specialised texts. We explain our approach by means of the logbooks and terms in Basque. A side effect of this works is also enriching the wordnets with new variants and synsets.

## introduction language for specific purposes (lsp) is a subfield of applied linguistics that studies language in different contexts e.g. language for business, language for engineering, etc. the work in this area has been mainly done in the field of terminology, but nowadays theory-building data analysis and classroom/workplace practice have an important role in the development of the field @xcite . in this paper, we propose to use wordnets as a lexical/terminological references to consult in lsp teaching. exactly, we present a method that combines textual genre analysis together with classroom practice in order to compile terms to be included in wordnets. the final aim is to provide students with a multilingual and semantically rich consult resource that will gather of the terms that can be used in a specific textual genre. we have decided to use wordnets as a basis resource because they offer rich semantic information liked to different languages and we think it is appropriate to centralise all the resources. moreover, its relations are helpful for students when looking for similar words, related concepts, etc. that is why, we propose a new relation: the term used in. this relation will link all the terms/synsets that can be used in a textual genre, without altering the hierarchy of wordnet. the context of this research is basque as lsp for sea studies. currently, many subjects are taught in basque at university level, but it is still a language under normalisation (the standard variant was officially created in 1968) and this fact influences the corpus and the resources we can use: there is no specialised corpus on some fields of knowledge and lexicographic/terminological data is sparse. moreover, as in the case of fishing or farming, the specialised variant has been oral. that is why we propose to base on textual genres, standard models of text types. following cabré (1999), we also think that specialised texts meet certain norms that vary depending on the domain. indeed, textual genres are a key component on specialised discourse @xcite . moreover, during this work, as side-effect we are also enriching wordnets, in our case, basque wordnet (bwn) @xcite . to illustrate our approach, we report on case study about logbooks, a nautical textual genre that compiles terms from different domains such as metrology, meteorology, geography among others. we will work on terms on basque language, a language under normalisation that is developing its specialised languages. this paper is structured as follows: in section 2 we sum up the context of our work; in section 3 we present our approach and we show an example of its practical application in section 4. after that, in section 5 we discuss some issues relating the process and we conclude and outline the future work in section 6. ## domains, specialised knowledge and textual genres domains are usually defined as unitary areas of knowledge (specialised or not) and are related to semantic fields, subject matters, broadtopics, subject codes, subject domains, categories... in word-net @xcite we can find the domain of synset/member of this domain, where synsets are linked with a category, region or usage pointer (domains) and the domains are linked with synsets. in wordnet domains @xcite synsets have been semiautomatically annotated with one or more domain labels from a set of 165 hierarchically organised labels, contrasted to the dewey decimal classification (ddc) system. in extended wnd @xcite a graph-based approach was carried out to improve wordnet domains by means of a simple inheritance process through the nominal and verbal hierarchies and applying ukb to propagate the domain information. babeldomains @xcite are automatically created by combining distributional and graph-based approaches and are based on wikipedia categories for the featured articles. these hierarchical approaches are related to classical terminology work. specialised knowledge is the principles and techniques that are acquired in a particular discipline. according to @xcite , specialised knowledge is transferred by terminological units (terms) and this transfer occurs during the specialised communication, in the discourse produced in each situation by the experts (communicative approach to terminology). a way of studying the specialised communication is through the corpus analysis. indeed, many works dealt with terminology extraction from corpus e.g. @xcite . a key component of specialised discourse is the textual genre, a prototypical type of discourse. @xcite points out that documents corresponding to textual genres are used in every professional domain, and that students should know their standard features and characteristics in order to be able to write them. these standards include format, phraseology and vocabulary. in other words, each textual genre will be marked by its own terms. ## approach for gathering terms the approach we propose is conceived for environments where no corpus or few texts exist and the lexicographic/terminological resources are sparse and scattered. next, we explain the proposed approach. we propose to create the term used in relation in order to offer students lsp students help when writing and consulting specialised vocabulary and terminology. in this section we describe a practical application of the above presented methodology. in this case study we will report on the logbooks and basque terms. ## discussion following the presented approach, we have gathered terms and included in a semantically rich resource such as bwn, and tried to avoid the dispersion of terms, an important problem with basque nautical terminology as shown in section 4.1. in addition, we have provided lsp students an improved and centralised resource to help write the specialised texts. however, when trying to represent these terms in bwn we have found some issues we will like to discuss. the first is about the conceptualisation: in logbooks and referential resources some terms are organised in a different way from wordnet and sometimes that classification was more detailed than the wordnet hierarchy e.g the types of the clouds (figure 2 ) were organised in our resource taking the levels low, mid, high... ( in green) into account whereas in wordnet all of them are together (in black) . secondly, many terms are not in english. for instance, local meteorologic phenomena like galerna, or international conventions such as the douglas scale, shapes of waves, etc. so the need of new language dependant concepts are necessary. that is, the need of cili @xcite is remarkable in this work. in fact, many of these terms are international and other wordnets would profit from these new synsets. thirdly, as we have seen, several domains are linked by gathering terms/synsets approach. in the case of the logbooks, moreover, it is remarkable that, although it is a text from the nautical domain, most of its words are not included in the nautical domain of wordnet domains hierarchy. this makes us think of bigger domains, domains where knowledge from different areas meets. indeed, this is related to communicative bottom-up approaches @xcite . finally, we would like to encourage the use of the proposed relation term used in so that all these variants can be related. indeed, we think it can be a step towards the characterisation of professional textual genres in wordnets. moreover, as textual genres are international models, this approach can help to improve the recall of wordnets, since it allows to detect missing synsets, that is, words that are in certain texts, but not yet in wordnet. ## conclusion and future work in this paper we have presented a method to get specialised knowledge by gathering terms and to include it in wordnets. moreover, we want to encourage the use of wordnets in lsp classrooms as a dictionary, that can be useful for less-resourced specialised languages. to that end, we rely on textual genres as basis for term/synset gathering to be included in bwn. indeed, textual genres have been proven to be useful to compile terms that would not appear in traditional hierarchies since they belong to different domains. we have explained our approach by means of the case of logbooks in basque, a professional textual genre with terms from different domains and a language which is developing its specialised languages. moreover, we have proposed a new relation called term used in for wordnets through which students can consults terms that can be used in a certain textual genre. as future work, we plan to analyse other textual genres from the engineering domain and keep on adding terms to basque wordnet and, thus, enriching it.