Antonio San Martín

Antonio San Martín

This paper examines the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT on the creation and consumption of terminological definitions. From the terminologist's point of view, the strategic use of GenAI tools can streamline the process of crafting definitions, reducing both time and effort, while potentially enhancing quality. GenAI tools enable AI-assisted terminography, notably post-editing terminography, where the machine produces a definition that the terminologist then corrects or refines. However, the potential of GenAI tools to fulfill all the terminological needs of a user, including term definitions, challenges the very existence of terminological definitions and resources as we know them. Unlike terminological definitions, GenAI tools can describe the knowledge activated by a term in a specific context. However, a main drawback of these tools is that their output can contain errors. For this reason, users requiring reliability will likely still resort to terminological resources for definitions. Nevertheless, with the inevitable integration of AI into terminology work, the distinction between human-created and AI-created content will become increasingly blurred.

Antonio San Martín

In this doctoral thesis, we apply premises of cognitive linguistics to terminological definitions and present a proposal called the flexible terminological definition. This consists of a set of definitions of the same concept made up of a general definition (in this case, one encompassing the entire environmental domain) along with additional definitions describing the concept from the perspective of the subdomains in which it is relevant. Since context is a determining factor in the construction of the meaning of lexical units (including terms), we assume that terminological definitions can, and should, reflect the effects of context, even though definitions have traditionally been treated as the expression of meaning void of any contextual effect. The main objective of this thesis is to analyze the effects of contextual variation on specialized environmental concepts with a view to their representation in terminological definitions. Specifically, we focused on contextual variation based on thematic restrictions. To accomplish the objectives of this doctoral thesis, we conducted an empirical study consisting of the analysis of a set of contextually variable concepts and the creation of a flexible definition for two of them. As a result of the first part of our empirical study, we divided our notion of domain-dependent contextual variation into three different phenomena: modulation, perspectivization and subconceptualization. These phenomena are additive in that all concepts experience modulation, some concepts also undergo perspectivization, and finally, a small number of concepts are additionally subjected to subconceptualization. In the second part, we applied these notions to terminological definitions and we presented we presented guidelines on how to build flexible definitions, from the extraction of knowledge to the actual writing of the definition.