A glossary (from , glossa; language, speech, wording), also known as a vocabulary or clavis, is an alphabetical list of terms in a particular domain of knowledge with their definitions. Glossaries are often placed at the end of a book to define novel, uncommon, or specialized terms. Glossaries are most commonly found in non-fiction.
A bilingual glossary defines words in another language.
A glossary explains concepts relevant to a field of study or action, as a form of ontology. Techniques for extracting an ontologyR. Navigli, P. Velardi. From Glossaries to Ontologies: Extracting Semantic Structure from Textual Definitions, Ontology Learning and Population: Bridging the Gap between Text and Knowledge (P. Buitelaar and P. Cimiano, Eds.), Series information for Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, IOS Press, 2008, pp. 71-87. or computational lexiconR. Navigli. Using Cycles and Quasi-Cycles to Disambiguate Dictionary Glosses, Proc. of 12th Conference of the European Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2009), Athens, Greece, March 30-April 3rd, 2009, pp. 594-602. have been proposed.
Core glossary
A core glossary is a simple glossary or explanatory dictionary that enables definition of other concepts, especially for newcomers to a language or field of study. It contains a small working vocabulary and definitions for important or frequently encountered concepts, usually including idioms or metaphors useful in a culture.
Automatic extraction of glossaries Computational approaches to the automated extraction of glossaries from corporaJ. Klavans and S. Muresan. Evaluation of the Definder System for Fully Automatic Glossary Construction . In Proc. of American Medical Informatics Association Symp., 2001, pp. 324–328. or the WebA. Fujii, T. Ishikawa. Utilizing the World Wide Web as an Encyclopedia: Extracting Term Descriptions from Semi-Structured Texts. In Proc. 38th Ann. Meeting Assoc. for Computational Linguistics, 2000, pp. 488–495.P. Velardi, R. Navigli, P. D'Amadio. Mining the Web to Create Specialised Glossaries, IEEE Intelligent Systems, 23(5), IEEE Press, 2008, pp. 18-25. have been developed in the recent years. These methods typically start from domain terminology and extract one or more glosses for each term of interest. Glosses can then be analyzed to extract hypernyms of the defined term and other lexical and semantic relations.
See also Controlled vocabulary Dictionary Frahang-i Pahlavig, a glossary of Pahlavi logograms Index (publishing) Terminology extraction
References
External links
glossarist.com: The Glossarist - Large list of glossaries www.ontopia.net: The TAO of Topic Maps www.babel-linguistics.com: Babel Linguistics Glossaries Selected Multilingual Glossaries by Industry This provides a detailed description of the development of glossaries in classical languages.