ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses issues concerning terminological knowledge bases (TKBs). A TKB was initially defined at the crossroads of terminology and knowledge engineering as a knowledge base taking into account the twofold nature of a term: conceptual and linguistic. In fact, at the beginning, issues concerning TKBs mainly concerned the way knowledge engineering could help terminologists to structure specialised knowledge. The main aim was to build knowledge representation models that were usable by tools. On the one hand, this step was of great importance for the improvement of terminology studies, particularly because terminologists had to analyse the link between terms and specialised discourses. But, on the other hand, the necessity of representing knowledge under a network model sometimes appeared to be too restrictive and too far remote from discourse, and this point generated dissatisfaction. Nevertheless, an unforeseen result of studies developed with the aim of building TKBs from texts was that tool-assisted methods were designed for exploring specialised texts systematically. First, this chapter presents the origins and the aim of terminological knowledge bases. Second, it details the tool-assisted linguistic methods for building TKBs from texts. Finally, it shows how similar methods may be applied to meet other needs in which terms and relations are not the result of linguistic analyses but rather the point of departure for the study of specialized texts. Note that the viewpoint adopted in this chapter is mainly that of a linguist.
