fpsyg-07-00196 February 19, 2016 Time: 20:46 # 1 HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY published: 23 February 2016 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00196 Specialized Knowledge Representation and the Parameterization of Context Pamela Faber* and Pilar León-Araúz Department of Translation and Interpreting, University of Granada, Granada, Spain Though instrumental in numerous disciplines, context has no universally accepted definition. In specialized knowledge resources it is timely and necessary to parameterize context with a view to more effectively facilitating knowledge representation, understanding, and acquisition, the main aims of terminological knowledge bases. This entails distinguishing different types of context as well as how they interact with each other. This is not a simple objective to achieve despite the fact that specialized discourse does not have as many contextual variables as those in general language (i.e., figurative meaning, irony, etc.). Even in specialized text, context is an extremely complex concept. In fact, contextual information can be specified in terms of scope Edited by: Marco Cruciani, or according to the type of information conveyed. It can be a textual excerpt or a University of Trento, Italy whole document; a pragmatic convention or a whole culture; a concrete situation or Reviewed by: a prototypical scenario. Although these versions of context are useful for the users Elisabetta Lalumera, of terminological resources, such resources rarely support context modeling. In this Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy paper, we propose a taxonomy of context primarily based on scope (local and global) Rita Temmerman, and further divided into syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic facets. These facets cover Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Belgium Pius Ten Hacken, the specification of different types of terminological information, such as predicate- Universität Innsbruck, Austria argument structure, collocations, semantic relations, term variants, grammatical and *Correspondence: lexical cohesion, communicative situations, subject fields, and cultures. Pamela Faber [email protected] Keywords: context parameters, specialized knowledge, terminology, terminological knowledge bases Specialty section: This article was submitted to INTRODUCTION Language Sciences, a section of the journal According to Akman and Surav (1997) and Akman (2000), the denotation of context has become Frontiers in Psychology murkier as its uses have spread out in many directions to the extent that it has become a sort of Received: 31 August 2015 ‘conceptual garbage can.’ For this reason, efforts are currently being made to parameterize and Accepted: 01 February 2016 generally make sense of context and all that it implies. However, though instrumental in numerous Published: 23 February 2016 disciplines, context has no universally accepted definition, because it can point to many different Citation: things. In the same way as the definition of any word, the definition of context can also vary Faber P and León-Araúz P (2016) depending on the field of application, such as Linguistics, Cognitive Science, or Computer Science Specialized Knowledge Representation (Bazire and Brézillon, 2005). and the Parameterization of Context. Specialized knowledge is related to all of these three areas in the sense that (1) it is shared and Front. Psychol. 7:196. disseminated through linguistic communicative acts (journal articles, conferences, etc.); (2) it is doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00196 processed and acquired in the mind; and (3) it may be subjected to formalization. Therefore, the Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 1 February 2016 | Volume 7 | Article 196 fpsyg-07-00196 February 19, 2016 Time: 20:46 # 2 Faber and León-Araúz Specialized Knowledge Representation and the Parameterization of Context parameterization of context for specialized knowledge found in the literature of different areas. In Section “Context and representation should be approached from a multidisciplinary Terminology,” context representation is described with regards perspective. to terminology and specialized knowledge. The Section “Context Specialized knowledge can be represented in a variety Parameters” proposes a taxonomy of context parameters from a of formats (i.e., ontologies, vocabularies, thesauri, controlled local to a global scope further divided into syntactic, semantic, languages, databases, etc.) that may or may not support context, and pragmatic facets. These facets cover the specification because knowledge resources are conceived for very different of different types of contextually relevant terminological purposes (i.e., classification, reasoning, knowledge acquisition, information, such as predicate-argument structure, collocations, standardization, harmonization, information retrieval, machine, semantic relations, term variants, grammatical, and lexical or human translation, etc.). More specifically, terminological cohesion, communicative situations, subject fields, and cultures. knowledge bases (TKBs) generally describe the concepts and The examples given are drawn from the domain of environmental terms of specialized knowledge domains for users with linguistic science based on the experience acquired while building and/or cognitive needs. TKB users are most often human (e.g., EcoLexicon (ecolexicon.ugr.es), an environmental multilingual translators, experts, technical writers), but computer applications TKB. The Section “Conclusion and Future Work” provides the can also benefit from terminological resources when it comes conclusions derived from the parameterization of context for to automatically interpreting and/or producing specialized texts. specialized knowledge representation. Even though TKBs usually provide conceptual representations based on some sort of knowledge modeling mechanism, they rarely support context modeling. In other words, very few WHAT IS CONTEXT? provide controlled partial information concerning conceptual entities by viewing them from different viewpoints or situations. Research communities envision context differently since they This can be a problem because the meaning, designation, conceive it in relation to different entities. Thus, context may be collocates, and location of a concept within a knowledge the parts of discourse surrounding a word, sentence, or passage, configuration or linguistic structure often vary, depending on also known as co-text (Textual Linguistics), the set of situational context. elements where the object being processed is included (Cognitive Contextual information must thus be included in a TKB Psychology), or that which surrounds and gives meaning to that aspires to being a knowledge representation resource. something else (Computer Science). In this regard, it is timely and necessary to parameterize In Linguistics, context has long been regarded as an essential context in specialized knowledge domains with a view to more factor in the interpretation of linguistic utterances. It plays an effectively facilitating knowledge representation, understanding, important role in different tasks, such as meaning construction, and acquisition. Nevertheless, matters are further complicated inference, variation, modulation, sense disambiguation, etc. by the fact that context itself is a complex, multidimensional Quite often co-textual elements are sufficient to resolve concept. Reasons for its conceptual fuzziness include the ambiguity, but sometimes other context types also come into following: (i) there are various types of contexts; (ii) many types play. of data can be extracted from context analysis; (iii) contexts can Apart from the co-text sense, context in Linguistics is also also be used for a wide range of different purposes. mentioned in relation to pragmatic and cognitive notions, such as Contextual information can be specified in terms of scope speech acts (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), conventions (Gadamer, (local vs. global) or according to the type of information 1995), maxims (Grice, 1975), framing (Goffman, 1974), common conveyed (syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variables). As ground (Clark, 1996), and mutual manifestness (Sperber and reflected in corpus analysis, when context is mentioned in Wilson, 1986, 1990), which refers to what one is capable of a text, it is metaphorically conceived as a container or a inferring or perceiving even if one has not done so as yet. bounded space, since an utterance can be “in context” or “out The sum of these shared assumptions constitutes the cognitive of context.” Context also frames or surrounds the utterance or environment of a group of individuals, which provides the object of analysis. In this sense, context bears a resemblance to foundation for successful communication (Yus, 2006). Fauconnier’s(1985, 1997) mental spaces since the location of an These notions are related to sociocultural factors accounting utterance in this bounded space or container is what makes it for broader contextual variables, such as communicative settings, meaningful. As a relational construct in texts, context helps to cultures, or world knowledge. Evidently, context has also been anchor linguistic designations to objective reality by providing extensively studied in discourse studies, where it has been defined background information, situating objects and processes, and as the totality of conditions under which discourse is being explicitly relating them to each other as well as to the agents that produced, circulated and interpreted (Blommaert, 2005, p. 251). manipulate them and act on them. It is thus a constraining