Frame-based terminology applied to military science: transforming a glossary into a knowledge resource

Abstract

This paper describes a Frame-Based Terminology approach to the military terminology of the Spanish Armed Forces. The alphabetically organized (PD0-000) glossary of military terms of the Spanish Armed Forces was transformed into MiliMarco [MiliFrame], a bilingual terminological knowledge base in which each concept appears within a hierarchy of conceptual categories and a semantic network. Frame-based resources enhance access to domain knowledge in a contextualized way, since embedding concepts in a knowledge structure activates associative information in semantic memory and promotes context availability. The design and population of MiliMarco involved the analysis and transformation of the content in the glossary entries as well as the extraction of new information. For this purpose, specialized knowledge structures were elaborated from the definitions in the glossary and from the lexicalization of semantic relations in the corpus. New concepts were added to fill the gaps in the glossary and additional data categories were included, such as images, collocations, and contexts. Previous work on military ontologies, usually in the form of controlled, structured vocabularies, is limited to a specific domain (e.g., military intelligence). MiliMarco has the advantage of providing an expanded view of the military domain in the form of conceptual networks combined with linguistic contexts that go far beyond simple hierarchies. Although still an ongoing project, the resulting knowledge base is currently a concept-oriented resource where users can browse through the conceptual hierarchy and semantic networks based on their cognitive and communicative needs.