Researcher of the Month: Päivi Pasanen

What are expressions called terms by common language users and the concepts behind these expressions like? The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Päivi Pasanen, a lecturer of Russian Translation, describes her study on the Language Bank’s HS.fi News and Comments Corpus.

Who are you?

I am Päivi Pasanen, and I work as a lecturer of Russian Translation at the Department of Modern Languages of the University of Helsinki.

What is your research topic?

Recognition of specialized terminology and semi-automatic extraction of terminological information in text.

I am the responsible researcher in the Translation Studies and Terminology Research Community (TraST). The goals of the research community’s terminological research include contributing to the development of tools required by translators.

How is your research related to the Language Bank?

Terminological research has traditionally concentrated on specialized communication using special fields’ texts as corpora. In my experience, however, terms appear in standard language communcation as well.

Using the corpora, my aim is to answer the question what expressions called terms by common language users and the concepts behind these expressions are like. I presented my research at the Vakki symposium 2015.

In the first phase of the study, the corpus was the Language Bank’s HS.fi News and Comments Corpus compiled out of domestic news and their comments in Helsingin Sanomat. In term extraction and inspection of the terms’ context, I utilized the Korp concordance tool.

Information about the HS.fi News and Comments Corpus (in Finnish)

The FIN-CLARIN consortium consists of a group of Finnish universities along with CSC – IT Center for Science and the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus). FIN-CLARIN helps the researchers in Finland to use, to refine, to preserve and to share their language resources. The Language Bank of Finland is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.

All previously published Language Bank researcher interviews are stored in the Researcher of the Month archive.