The Multilingual Digital Terminology Today (MDTT) international conference is a new annual event for researchers on Digital Terminology (DT), and related topics, which aims to bring together specialists in the disciplines of terminology, terminography, computational terminology, computational linguistics, and Natural Language Processing (NLP), in order to share methodological reflections on design approaches, representation formats and management systems of the digital terminology collected in multilingual terminological resources. The idea of organizing a conference on Digital Terminology stems from the desire to bring out the interdisciplinary component that characterizes this research area. Working in terminology nowadays means not only exploring the conceptual and linguistic dimensions of specialized knowledge, but also investigating on how to structure and represent this information in a digital ecosystem in order to guarantee its optimal reuse at the basis of the advancement of scientific research. MDTT sets itself as an international component of a Digital Terminology panorama that comprehends long-standing international and national events on terminology, among others: European Association for Terminology (EAFT) summit (https://www.eaft-aet.net/), Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) (http://www.elra.info/en/lrec/) , Terminology & Ontology: Theories and applications (TOTh) (http://toth.condillac.org/), Rete panlatina di terminologia (REALITER) (http://www.realiter.net/), Réseau Lexicologie, Terminologie, Traduction (LTT) (https://www.reseau-ltt.net/), and Associazione Italiana per la Terminologia (Ass.I.Term) (http://www.assiterm91.it/). In particular, the first edition of this event is organized around four main research topics. The first topic analyzes how much the information needs of the identified user influence the
design and implementation of a new terminological resource. For example, how the educational, professional, and informational requirements afect the implemented resource. The second topic is devoted to the evaluation of structural resource design approaches. In particular, we want to examine, from an analytical perspective, the models and paradigms for the optimal design of terminological data collections in order to respond to the principles of Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD), and Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability (FAIR) data. The third topic proposes a reflection on the formats for the optimal representation of terminological data and metadata in the light of the design approach adopted. In particular, the contributions include case studies of resources implemented according to formats such as TBX (TermBase eXchange), RDF (Resource Description Framework), SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System), OWL (Web Ontology Language). The fourth topic aims to create a dialogue between contributions that focus on the validation of the ergonomics of specific terminological resources. In particular, we reflect on the best approaches to display digital terminological data and methods for evaluating the functionalities ofered to the user.
In accordance with the Open Science principles, MDTT adopts a free and open access publication scheme through the CEUR Workshop Proceedings system (CEUR-WS.org). The submitted papers went through a double-blind review process that required at least two reviews by members of the international scientific committee paper. We accepted eighteen short papers (which is the standard format of the conference). Many papers were authored by Italian, Spanish and French researchers, but in this first edition we were very happy to welcome authors also from Austria, Belgium, Cameroon, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Mongolia, Portugal, South Africa, Switzerland, and United States.
The two keynote speakers were Prof. Rute Costa (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal) with title “Transitions en Terminologie” about the evolution of terminology throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and Prof. Roberto Navigli (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy) with title “Ten Years of BabelNet and Beyond” about the evolution of the lexical-semantic knowledge resource that helps to scale tasks and applications to hundreds of languages.
The first edition of the MDTT conference was organized at the University of Padua with the patronage of the University itself (https://www.unipd.it/), and the two involved Departments, Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari (https://www.disll.unipd.it/) and Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione (https://www.dei.unipd.it/). In addition, we also had the patronage of the Associazione Italiana per la Terminologia (Ass.I.Term) (http://www.assiterm91.it) and the Centro di documentazione e di Ricerca per la Didattica della Lingua Francese nell’Università Italiana (Do.Ri.F.) (https://www.dorif.it/). We were also very happy to receive a sponsorship from two Horizon 2020 projects, the Examode Horizon 2020 EU Project (https://www.examode. eu/) and the MICOLL ERC Consolidator Grant project (https://www.micoll-erc.eu/), and the Associazione Italiana per la Comunicazione Tecnica (COM&TEC) (https://www.comtec-italia. org).