Using Wikipedia to Validate Term Candidates for the Mexican Basic Scientific Vocabulary

Abstract. Terms are usually defined as lexical units that designate concepts of a thematically restricted domain. Their detection is useful for a number of purposes such as: building (terminological) dictionaries, text indexing, automatic translation, improving automatic summarisation systems and, in general, whatever task that contains any domain specific component. In spite of the numerous applications, their recognition constitutes a bottleneck for such applications. Since the 80s, a number of researches have been conducted on this topic with limited results. One of the reasons of such behaviour is the lack of semantic knowledge implemented in such systems. As well, these resources are scarce and difficult to manage. For some time now, large knowledge repositories have become publicly available, opening new opportunities to terminology recognition. This paper presents a new method using the free encyclopaedia Wikipedia to obtain the basic scientific vocabulary of Mexican Spanish from a corpus of school textbooks corresponding to high school education. The proposed method has been successfully applied to such Spanish texts for obtaining the basic terminology in the domain of mathematics