Culture is underrepresented in terminological resources and ideology is an especially complicated cultural aspect to convey. This complexity stems from the intertwined relationships among the discourse community of politicians, the media and the general public, as well as their interactions with scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, terminological resources should provide the necessary information to understand the political perspective taken in discourse on scientific issues with a high political profile. As in all specialized domains, environmental concepts and terms are subject to dynamism and variation (León-Araúz, 2017). Cognitive term variants (e.g., climate change, climate crisis) are of particular interest because of their presence in political discourse and their potential to influence climate actions. They can be used to reflect multidimensionality, imprecision or ideological attachment. This paper describes a method based on framing in Communication Studies to extract ideological knowledge from corpora. We used Spanish and English parliamentary debates (ParlaMint 2.1) and annotated the interventions that included a term variant of climate change according to an adapted version of the frames proposed by Bolsen and Shapiro (2018). The results showed how climate change discourse changes across de ideological spectrum and we give a proposal on how to represent that knowledge in an environmental TKB on the environment.
In scientific and technical communication, multiword terms are the most frequent type of lexical units. Rendering them in another language is not an easy task due to their cognitive complexity, the proliferation of different forms, and their unsystematic representation in terminographic resources. This often results in a broad spectrum of translations for multiword terms, which also foment term variation since they consist of two or more constituents. In this study we carried out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Spanish translation variants of a set of environment-related concepts by evaluating equivalents in three parallel corpora, two comparable corpora and two terminological resources. Our results showed that MWTs exhibit a significant degree of term variation of different characteristics, which were used to establish a set of criteria according to which term variants should be selected, organized and described in terminological knowledge bases.
Noun compounds (NCs) are semantically complex and not fully compositional, as is often assumed. This paper presents a pilot study regarding the semantic annotation of environmental NCs with a view to accessing their semantics and exploring their domain-based contextual variation. Our results showed that the semantic annotation of NCs afforded important insights into how context impacts their conceptualization.