Photo: Harri Huusko
Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Anita Nuopponen, professor in technical communication at the University of Vaasa tells us about how she makes use of the resource The Finnish Sub-corpus of the Newspaper and Periodical Corpus of the National Library of Finland, Kielipankki Version.
I am Anita Nuopponen, professor in technical communication from the School of Marketing and Communication, Communication Studies, University of Vaasa.
I have once again returned to terminology research, the subject of my dissertation in 1994. My special interest still concerns relations between concepts. The typology I have created for them is still relevant, since there is a need to distinguish between various types of concept relations in information systems and digitalization initiatives. Part of the relation types in the classification is going to be included in the next version of the international Terminology Standard ISO 704. The second current research area I am focusing on – also related to conceptual relations – is developing a systematic concept analysis method that makes use of the relations. I am currently working on an article on conceptual analysis as an aid to research work and also on a collaborative article on terminological methods in teaching special languages to students in various fields. Both will appear in the VAKKI Symposium series.
At the moment I am on research leave and work partly on FIN-CLARIN initiative funding with the aim to create for Kielipankki content that is similar to the work I have done on my Terminology Forum site since 1994. I have thus returned to continue the work I started years ago! I am now looking for online vocabularies and glossaries available in Finnish in various fields, and creating a link list out of them, but the aim is to deposit glossaries with Kielipankki’s collections when possible. Interested parties in various fields, teachers, enterprises, associations and other organizations have compiled glossaries covering their own fields, and published them online. Several people could benefit from these if only they were available. All glossaries do not end up in TSK’s TEPA term bank or the Helsinki Term Bank for the Arts and Sciences. Many valuable resources disappear when the creator of the vocabulary changes jobs, retires or when the website of a company is renewed.
I became familiar with Kielipankki in the context of my presentation “Vaikeasti käsitettävä käsitteen käsite” [The concept of the concept is difficult to comprehend] in the Annual Conference on Linguistics in 2015. I used the data from the year 2000 included in the The Finnish Sub-corpus of the Newspaper and Periodical Corpus of the National Library of Finland, Kielipankki Version to study the definitions of concept and how the word concept is used and how concepts are addressed – I focused mainly on general language. The word concept is a frequently used word in general language and its function follows the personal intuition of each writer, and often that intuition is identical to the definition used in terminological research and given in dictionaries of general language. However, already in the next sentence it can be mixed with word, term or even phenomenon. This often happens in scientific writing, too.
The paper on concepts mentioned above is yet to be published. The present project on Terminology Forum has not yet resulted in related publications, but there are presentations and articles from various contexts on making use of the internet in collecting and disseminating terminological resources. (Publication list: http://lipas.uwasa.fi/~atn/AnitaNuopponen/index.html)
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.
