Reviewing and evaluating automatic term recognition techniques

Automatic Term Recognition (ATR) is defined as the task of identifying domain specific terms from technical corpora. Termhood-based approaches measure the degree that a candidate term refers to a domain specific concept. Unithood-based approaches measure the attachment strength of a candidate term constituents. These methods have been evaluated using different, often incompatible evaluation schemes and datasets. This paper provides an overview and a thorough evaluation of state-of-the-art ATR methods, under a common evaluation framework, i.e. corpora and evaluation method. Our contributions are two-fold: (1) We compare a number of different ATR methods, showing that termhood-based methods achieve in general superior performance. (2) We show that the number of independent occurrences of a candidate term is the most effective source for estimating term nestedness, improving ATR performance. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.