Extracting domain-specific terms using contextual word embeddings

Abstract

Automated terminology extraction refers to the task of extracting meaningful terms from domain-specific texts. This paper proposes a novel machine learning approach to terminology extraction, which combines features from traditional term extraction systems with novel contextual features derived from contextual word embeddings. Instead of using a predefined list of part-of-speech patterns, we first analyse a new term-annotated corpus RSDO5 for the Slovenian language and devise a set of rules for term candidate selection and then generate statistical, linguistic and context-based features. We use a support-vector machine algorithm to train a classification model, evaluate it on the four domains (biomechanics, linguistics, chemistry, veterinary) of the RSDO5 corpus and compare the results with state-of-art term extraction approaches for the Slovenian language. Our approach provides significant improvements in terms of F1 score over the previous state-of-the-art, which proves that contextual word embeddings are valuable for improving term extraction.