Mining Multiword Terms from Wikipedia

The collection of the specialized vocabulary of a particular domain (terminology) is an important initial step of creating formalized domain knowledge representations (ontologies). Terminology extraction (TE) aims at automating this process by collecting the relevant domain vocabulary from existing lexical resources or collections of domain texts. In this chapter, we address the extraction of multiword terminology, as multiword terms are very frequent in terminology, but typically poorly represented in standard lexical resources. We present our method for mining multiword terminology from Wikipedia and the freely available terminology resource that we extracted using the presented method. Terminology extraction based on Wikipedia exploits the advantages of a huge multilingual, domain-transcending knowledge source and large scale structural information that can identify potential multiword units without the need for linguistic processing tools. Thus, while evaluated in English, the proposed method is basically applicable to all languages in Wikipedia