How Terms Meet in Small-World Lexical Networks: The Case of Chemistry Terminology

International audienceWe present a new type of terminological model based on formal network structures called "lexical systems". Those are non-hierarchical lexical graphs where the bulk of lexical relations is formally encoded by means of Meaning-Text lexical functions. This paper describes how this approach to lexical structuring can be applied to the modeling of terminologies, more specifically, to the French and English terminology of chemistry. The first section explains the importance of terminology in chemistry and introduces the aim of our project. Section 2 is a brief presentation of formal characteristics of lexical systems. Section 3 illustrates the type of terminological descriptions we are implementing with the specific case of the chemical term "catalysis"