On Friday, September 21, 2018, Sara CARVALHO, PhD student in Information and Communication Sciences at theLaboratory of Computer Science, Systems, Information and Knowledge Processing (LISTIC), will defend her thesis entitled "A terminological approach to organizing knowledge in the field of endometriosis: the EndoTerm project."
The defense will take place at 3 p.m. in room 001 atUniversidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal.
Thesis summary
This project, developed in the field of terminology, is based on the contribution that terminology can make to the representation and organization of specialized knowledge. It aims to create EndoTerm, a bilingual terminology tool (European Portuguese and English) in the field of medicine, based on the concept of endometriosis. This project, intended for specialists in this field or related fields, as well as technical translators, aims to contribute to the improvement of specialized communication in this field. It thus aspires to highlight the social role that terminology can play in this entire process. More specifically, the project has the following fundamental objectives: a) To build a tool that can integrate the linguistic and conceptual dimensions of terminological data, with a structure that allows the user to navigate interactively, either by concept or by formant; b) To explore a possible link to the semantic web, thus enabling the organization of data in standardized and shareable formats and making it possible, a posteriori, to create applications related to indexing, searching, and retrieving information. the organization of data according to standardized and shareable formats and making it possible, a posteriori, to create applications related either to indexing, searching, and retrieving information, or to teaching languages for specific purposes or machine translation. c) Identify and systematize the formants present in the electronic corpus to be collected (the Fertis corpus) in order to conduct a detailed study of the structure and behavior of these elements in the field under study. Based on a reflection on specialized morphology proposed by Silva (2005a, 2005b), we consider it relevant to assess the extent to which formants serve as indicators of conceptual features and to verify the consequences, at the conceptual level, of the mobility of these constituents. Given that this topic has been little explored in the field of specialized languages and European Portuguese, this project could make an important contribution to the study of the construction of new terminological units in EP, to the affirmation of Portuguese as a language of science (many medical texts produced in Portugal are in English), and to the development of comparative studies of medical terminology in different languages. In terms of theoretical framework, this project is based on a conception of terminology as a field that brings together two different but interdependent dimensions that are essential for the organization of specialized knowledge: the linguistic dimension and the conceptual dimension (Costa & Roche, 2011a, 2011b; Roche, 2007a). We adopt the main guidelines of ontoterminology, particularly those that emphasize the importance of the concept as a starting point and the decisive role of specialists. However, we share the perspective of Costa (2006a), who considers the methodological dichotomy frequently presented in the literature (onomasiology vs. semasiology) to be reductive. Thus, in this project, we propose a mixed, and therefore complementary, methodology (see Costa & Roche, 2011a). Given that the proposed investigation focuses on the organization of knowledge, it will be relevant for the analysis to be conceptual, i.e., onomasiological, in the first instance, and then semasiological. This approach requires not only repeated collaboration with specialists in the field under study, but also the conscious use of specialized textual sources.