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Understanding specialized discourse requires the identification and activation of knowledge structures underlying the text. The expansion and enhancement of knowledge is thus an important part of the specialized translation process (Faber 2015). This paper explores how the analysis of terminological meaning can be addressed from the perspective of Frame-Based Terminology (FBT) (Faber 2012, 2015), a cognitive approach to domain-specific language, which directly links specialized knowledge representation to cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics. In this study, context expansion was explored in a three-stage procedure: from single terms to multi-word terms, from multi-word terms to phrases, and from phrases to frames. Our results showed that this approach provides valuable insights into the identification of the knowledge structures underlying specialized texts.

In English, the international language of communication (Tono in Lexicography 1(1):1–5, 2014), complex nominals (CNs) are frequently used to convey specialized concepts (Sager et al. in English special languages. Principles and practice in science and technology. Brandstetter Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1980; Nakov in Natural Language Engineering 19(03):291–330, 2013). These phraseological units have a nominal head that is modifed by another element (e.g., hydropower production). Problems can arise in relation to their identifcation, their bracketing or internal structure disambiguation, their meaning access, and their translation or production in another language. Although they are not marginal phenomena in specialized language, they are rarely included in specialized resources. Even when they are included, their treatment is not systematic (Cabezas-García and Faber in Computational and corpus-based phraseology. Springer, Cham, pp 145–159, 2017a). This article describes the representation of CNs in EcoLexicon (http://www.ecolexicon.ugr.es), a terminological knowledge base, whose new phraseological module will include verb collocations (e.g., a volcano spews lava) as well as CNs. For that purpose, we used a wind power corpus in English and Spanish for term extraction, semantic analysis, establishment of interlinguistic correspondences, and defnition crafting. We propose diferent access points to information (Kwary in International Journal of Lexicography 25(1):30–49, 2012), such as the CNs formed from a given term, a bilingual view in English and Spanish, or the syntactic–semantic combinations in CNs. The structure of the CN module is based on the semantics of these phraseological units, which facilitates the specifcation of mapping rules as well as knowledge acquisition (Faber in A cognitive linguistics view of terminology and specialized language. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, 2012).

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EcoLexicon es una base de conocimiento terminológica multilingüe sobre ciencias medioambientales desarrollada desde 2003 por el grupo de investigación LexiCon de la Universidad de Granada (España) y constituye la aplicación práctica de la teoría de la terminología basada en marcos. El presente artículo describe el funcionamiento de EcoLexicon y presenta sus últimos avances, que incluyen un nuevo corpus y una gramática semántica de word sketches en inglés, una reforma del módulo fraseológico, un enfoque flexible a las definiciones terminológicas y la representación conceptual mediante imágenes.