Extraction of Terms Related to Named Rivers

Abstract

EcoLexicon is a terminological knowledge base on environmental science, whose design permits the geographic contextualization of data. For the geographic contextualization of landform concepts, this paper presents a semi-automatic method for extracting terms associated with named rivers (e.g., Mississippi River). Terms were extracted from a specialized corpus, where named rivers were automatically identified. Statistical procedures were applied for selecting both terms and rivers in distributional semantic models to construct the conceptual structures underlying the usage of named rivers. The rivers sharing associated terms were also clustered and represented in the same conceptual network. The results showed that the method successfully described the semantic frames of named rivers with explanatory adequacy, according to the premises of Frame-Based Terminology.