=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3427/short9
|storemode=property
|title=Open Gender-sensitive Terminology Resources for the Digital Society: the Digitender Project (Short Paper)
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3427/short9.pdf
|volume=Vol-3427
|authors=Chelo Vargas-Sierra,María Isabel Santamaría-Pérez
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/mdtt/Vargas-SierraS23
}}
==Open Gender-sensitive Terminology Resources for the Digital Society: the Digitender Project (Short Paper)==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3427/short9.pdf
Open Gender-sensitive Terminology Resources for the Digital
Society: the Digitender Project (Short Paper)
Chelo Vargas-Sierra 1and M. Isabel Santamaría-Pérez 2
12
IULMA, University of Alicante, Cra. San Vicente del Raspeig s/n, San Vicente del Raspeig, 03690, Spain
Abstract
This paper1 will present the research project “Open multilingual gender-sensitive terminology
resources for the digital society: the DIGITENDER project”, l e d by research groups at
IULMA (University of Alicante) and the Computer Linguistics Laboratory at Universidad
Autónoma de Madrid. The aim of the DIGITENDER project is twofold. Firstly, it aims to
digitize the quality multilingual terminology resources (MTRs) already available at IULMA
(specialized bilingual dictionaries of legal, economic, stock market, tourism, etc. terms)
compiled some time ago and published by Ariel Editorial, and then publish them on the web
in a findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable format (FAIR). Secondly, women will be
visualized in two ways. We will then edit these MTR entries to mark the feminine gender
in Spanish in some entries, which we will complete with new subdomains and terms the
terminological glossaries already created on women’s health issues, which we call WHealth
and which include glossaries on menopause, osteoporosis, breast cancer, uterine cancer,
etc. DIGITENDER incorporates a gender perspective in the management of terminology
on women’s health issues and the main pathologies which, because of their prevalence or the
fact that they present differently in women to in men, are important to specifically study in
women. Our aim is to make visible, through an extensive open terminology repository and
terminology datasets in SKOS format, health issues that are particularly related to women. By
thus making available to the public some of the issues that arise in this field, such as
menopause, menstruation, etc., we also aim to break certain taboos and prototypes that lead
to health problems. The project is therefore justified by our will to make available to the
public our WHealth glossaries and to develop others from corpora to complete what will
be a large repository of gender-sensitive terminology.
Keywords
Multilingual terminology, term banks, women’s health terminology, terminology datasets
1. Introduction
Many studies are currently being carried out on terminology, both its theoretical and
methodological aspects. Terminology as a discipline has in fact been receiving increasing attention from
theorists and linguists, its importance lying in the fact that it is the field of knowledge where the lexical
elements that form part of a structured system of concepts are studied, a system in which particular terms
are largely responsible for conveying the knowledge of each scientific, technical, or professional
community. Cabré [1] highlights the diverse nature of this discipline, which is revealed in its
polyhedral perspective that stems from its foundations, its approaches, and its practical applications,
not forgetting the well-known polysemy of the term ‘terminology’ itself. Rey [2] proposed the name of
‘terminography’, others refer to this activity as ‘terminology work’. Whatever name is given to , it is
usually carried out by institutions concerned with defining recommendations for the standardization of
terminology, as well as by those institutions, universities, research groups, and organizations that aim to
collect together terms for their management and dissemination in term banks, glossaries, etc., with
several purposes in mind, such as knowledge transfer, translation, language for specific purposes
2nd International Conference on "Multilingual digital terminology today. Design, representation formats and management systems" (MDTT)
2023, June 29–30, 2023, Lisboa, Portugal
EMAIL: chelo.vargas@ua.es (A. 1); mi.santamaria@ua.es (A. 2)
ORCID: 0000-0002-4026-4372 (A. 1); 0000-0002-6264-1837 (A. 2)
© 2020 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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learning, etc.
A term bank is an essential tool for understanding a term, an acronym, checking a standard
denomination, finding an equivalent in another language, and so on. Furthermore, terminology, as a
branch of human knowledge, is closely related to other areas of knowledge: applied linguistics, logic,
ontology and computer science [1]. It i s also linked to all scientific and technical domains; in fact,
it is in these domains that its raison d'être originates and is acquires. Indeed, the importance of
terminology has grown over time and there is a proliferation of projects focused on improving
terminology resources at the national and international level, good examples being IATE, Termium
Plus, and TERMCAT.
One of the issues that caught our attention when we considered some of the Spanish terms is that
some entries did not include gender markers. What terms convey is knowledge and we may, then,
think that they are genderless. This is the case for a large number of high specialized terms that are
collected in different resources although many, such as aborto de repetición (recurrent miscarriage),
útero dismórfico, (dysmorphic uterus) and endometriosis, have a specific gender in Spanish and, as such,
obviously cannot be modified. However, there is another type of term, sometimes less specialized, but
nonetheless frequent and important in its specific domain, that is only collected and represented in some
term banks in its masculine version, when a feminine version does exist, as in the case of Spanish nouns
and adjectives that derive from verbs and acquire a meaning of “someone or something that does what
is expressed in the root of the verb”. These nouns and adjectives with gender motion are usually
lemmatized in dictionaries by the masculine, adding the feminine ending (-a, -ra), but this is not
always the case, especially in terminological resources. This is the case with ‘holder’, ‘owner’, and
‘manager’, whose Spanish equivalents do not have the feminine marker in some of the terminology
banks consulted.
Along with the above-mentioned terminological foundations, our project was shaped by our strong
desire to include a gender perspective in our research, but we also wondered how terminologists,
translators, and linguists could contribute to the development of more egalitarian societies where the
role of women is represented in subject-matter fields equal to that of men, as well as addressing specific
women problems. Our research aims to contribute terminologically to a field of knowledge directly
related to women and we thus decided that health would be a very interesting field to start with, given
the inequalities revealed by analyses carried out by the World Health Organization [3] [4]. The
following quote provided the impetus to advance this idea [5: p. 4]:
The introduction of gender studies into the field of health led to the visibility of many ‘new’ health
problems in women and their study as a relevant and legitimate field of scientific enquiry. Until then, both
medicine and public health dealt with women from a narrow perspective focused mainly on reproduction
and reproductive pathologies.
According to the above quote, the introduction of a gender perspective in medicine brought to the
forefront a number of women’s health problems that had not been studied previously, as research had
adopted a biased point of view by only paying attention to female-specific diseases, such as reproductive-
related problems and pathologies. More recent work on this issue can be found in Perspectiva de género
en medicina [6] in which we note that this problem is still not completely resolved. Ruíz Cantero [6: p.
10] points out that the concept of “gender bias” in health care appeared for the first time in 1991 in
reference to the fact that when faced with the same health needs in men and women, a greater diagnostic
or therapeutic effort is made in one sex with respect to the other, which can contribute to inequalities
in health. The fact is that the patterns of signs and symptoms, response to treatment and prognosis are
mostly formulated based on men; hence, these gender biases can lead to erroneous diagnosis and
treatment in women.
In Spain, public health interest in gender inequalities in health began during the early 2000s,
promoted, among by, other researchers, Dr. Colomer (2007). The Spanish Society of Public Health
promoted the setting up of an observatory (a government agency that monitors women's experiences of
health services and promotes their inclusion) discussion forums and the inclusion of gender inequalities
in its reports. However, despite these notable and determined efforts, invisibility in this area continues
to exist, as is clear from the title of the webinar hosted by the Observatorio de Salud de las Mujeres
(Spanish Women’s Health Observatory) issued in July 2021 —“Mujeres invisibles para la medicina.
Análisis pre y post pandemia2” (Women invisible to medicine. Pre- and post-pandemic analysis) —given
by Dr Carme Valls Llobet, Director of the Programa Mujer, Salud y Calidad de Vida (Women, Health
and Quality of Life Program) at the Centro de Análisis y Programas Sanitarios (Centre for Analysis
and Health Programs).
Taking all the points above into account, our research project incorporates a gender perspective
into terminology management (identifying, defining, updating, and maintaining terminology) about
women's health issues (WHealth) with the aim of making visible and increasing knowledge about the
health problems women usually suffer from, through an extensive open terminology repository. To this
end, the terminology record has been defined to contain a gender-specific health care fields in two major groups:
signs and symptoms and treatment. In this way, we will make publicly available knowledge about pathologies or
disorders that, because of their prevalence in women or because their characteristics are different in women than
they are in men, are important to study in women, draw attention to exactly these differences. There are other
health issues that are directly related to women, such as menopause and menstruation, or that affect women due
to social pressure, such as eating disorders, which we also address in the project, both to disseminate knowledge
and increase their visibility, and to break taboos and stigmas. We believe that the creation of multilingual
terminology resources for particular fields can help in this task as terminology plays a key role in any field of
knowledge and in its dissemination.
DIGITENDER is based on a series of needs that have been observed in the digital transition of multilingual
terminological resources created by some members of the IULMA Institute at the University of Alicante and LLI-
UAM. More specifically, on reviewing the MTRs available within our research group, we observed that some
entries were not gender sensitive. We aim to integrate the gender perspective into certain terminological records;
for example, those related to professions.
We have already built glossaries that are available in database format (.mdb), MARTIF (.mtf) and TermBase
eXchange (.tbx). Some of these resources are about women’s related health issues, such as:
● Assisted reproduction glossary: 437 bilingual terms.
● Menopause glossary: 208 bilingual terms.
● Osteoporosis glossary: 30 bilingual terms.
● Glossary of Breast Cancer: 70 bilingual terms.
● Glossary of Cervical Cancer: 202 bilingual terms.
● Glossary of Eating Disorders: 100 bilingual terms.
● Sexually Transmitted Diseases Glossary: 120 bilingual terms.
● Depression Glossary: 181 + 61 = 242 trilingual terms (plus Catalan).
● Glossary of the Female Reproductive System and its Pathologies: 131.
● Glossary of Rheumatic Diseases: 125 terms.
● Glossary of Pregnancy and Birth Terms: 205 terms.
● In Vitro Fertilisation Glossary: 99 bilingual terms.
● Bilingual Glossary of Healthy lifestyle: 297 bilingual entries.
● Endometriosis Glossary: 102 bilingual terms.
● Glossary of Thyroid Hormonal Diseases: 100 bilingual terms
Our aim is to review and complete these glossaries and develop new corpus-based terminology
resources to complete them taking into account the following fields or subdomains:
a. Gynecological health issues and disorders affecting women.
b. Pregnancy-related topics.
c. Infertility-related disorders.
d. Other disorders and diseases that affect only women.
e. Main pathologies which, because of their prevalence or because their characteristics differ
from those of men, are important to study in women.
Likewise, DIGITENDER is also based on a series of needs observed in what we hope will be the
“digital transition” of the multilingual terminological resources created by some members of IULMA at
the University of Alicante. More specifically, when reviewing the MTRs available in our research group,
we observed that some terms, such as those mentioned in a previous paragraph, did not include the
2
Source: https://www.observatoriosaludmujeres.es/mujeres-invisibles-para-la-medicina-analisis-pre-y-post-pandemia/
feminine form. Our aim is to add this gender mark in certain terminological registers; for example, those
related to professions (banquero, -a; ejecutivo, -a) and adjectives and nouns with gender motion
(propietario, -a; dueño, -a, etc.). The multilingual terminology resources we refer to, all of which have
been built by DIGITENDER researchers were published by a renowned publisher, are the following:
a. Dictionary of English-Spanish Legal Terms: 15,000 approx. bilingual entries.
b. Dictionary of Economic, Financial and Commercial Terms: 25,000 bilingual entries.
c. Dictionary of Stock Exchange Terms: 4,000 bilingual entries.
d. Dictionary of Banking Terms, 12,000 bilingual entries.
e. Dictionary of Human Rights Terms: 3.300 bilingual entries.
f. Dictionary of Natural Stone and Allied Industries: 8,000 bilingual entries.
In these resources we estimate that there are approximately 70,000 bilingual English-Spanish entries
in total.
2. Distribution of terminology resources
Consulting digital linguistic resources is now commonplace and easy. Nevertheless, our
specialized dictionaries are out of date, thus we need to digitize them in order to build a term bank and
make our resources publicly and freely available in a findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable
format [7] [8].
The term “open access” is now applied to refer to data which is configured and distributed in a form
that makes it reusable in the context of the semantic web. The Internet, as is well known, has become a
powerful medium for communication and research, and an ideal place for the exchange and provision
of goods and services of all kinds. Despite its advantages, its enormous potential is partially limited to
the human capacity to navigate, without getting lost, through the different sources of information
available and the incalculable number of indexed documents.
The exponential increase in the volume of information available on the Internet and the low precision
and coverage -or recall- in its retrieval have created technological need in two broad senses: a) to
improve the web by extending it with semantic metadata: this extended web is known as the “semantic
web” and is constituted as “a universally accessible platform that allows data to be shared and processed
by automated tools as well as by people” [9]; and b) to create more agile and efficient information
retrieval systems that are capable of understanding and managing information in an “intelligent” way.
The semantic web is a set of activities developed within the W3C, the aim of which is to create
technologies for the publication of data readable by computer applications. However, for the web of
data to become a reality, it is important that the vast amount of data on the web is available in a standard
format, accessible and manageable by semantic web tools. Furthermore, this web not only needs access
to the data, but also the capacity to facilitate the relationships between them, as the aim is to create an
interconnected web of data, as opposed to a simple collection of datasets. This collection of interrelated
datasets within the web is also known as “Linked Data” and “Linked Open Data” (LOD)
A great number of resources from different domains have already been published and connected
according to certain well-known recommendations, forming what is known as the Linked Open Data
cloud (https://lod-cloud.net/). To link terminological resources, we can go to the section of this cloud
called “Linguistics” and, within this, to the specific group for “Terminologies, Thesauri and Knowledge
Bases”, as shown in the following figure:
Figure 1. Linguistics Linked Open Data Cloud from lod-cloud.net
These initiatives are designed to address the shortcomings of information retrieval on the Internet
which require interoperable and multilingual vocabularies.
The Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) is a data model for sharing and linking
knowledge organization systems across the semantic web; it is a “W3C initiative in the form of an RDF
application that provides a model for representing the basic structure and content of conceptual schemas”
[10], including thesauri and controlled vocabularies. The use of the RDF format for SKOS allows
information to be made available in a format readable by software applications, and also to be exchanged
and published on the Internet. It is also designed to create new organizational systems or migrate existing
ones to the semantic web quickly and easily. An example of this, which has in part inspired our proposal,
is the EUROVOC glossary, originally available as an .xls file on the Internet and recently converted to
SKOS format. We will analyze our dataset in the different digital formats to provide a tailored and
customized solution and enhancement to enable the achievement of the goal related to the conversion of
all our terminology datasets to SKOS. These datasets will be distributed through the Zenodo.org
platform, within the Universitat d'Alacant Research Data Collection community3.
3. Objectives and methodology
The purpose of DIGITENDER is twofold: on the one hand, it aims to digitize the multilingual
terminology resources already available in our research group and to publish them on the Internet in a
FAIR format; on the other hand, this project also sets out to make women visible through
terminological resources, and as such we will edit specific terminology records in terms of gender
marking and will complete the terminology series on women’s health issues with new subdomains and
terms.
The terminological work that we have been involved in at the IULMA Institute follows the
principles postulated by the Communicative Theory of Terminology (CTT) [1], which is pragmatic
in nature (principle of adequacy) and corpus-based (principle of natural habitat). Without going
into all the specifics of terminology work due to space limitations, the methodology to enhance our
multilingual terminology resources will follow the principle of adequacy, which implies that each
terminology project must develop both a work strategy and the domain-specific terminology
repositories based on variables such as the subject matter, the recipients of the terminology application,
the objectives, the context of use of this application and the resources available. In short, a
working methodology “configurable by the terminographer” is proposed, i.e., according to the
prototypical user of the application we will build and the purposes for which it is intended.
We will carry out a descriptive terminological activity, aimed at compiling and illustrating the
3
https://zenodo.org/communities/universitat-alacant/?page=1&size=20
specialized items detected in the specialized texts that make up the corpora from which the terms are
extracted.
This project will use a cross-disciplinary methodology, drawing on the various disciplines that
contribute to its implementation: terminology, computational linguistics, and NLP. The transversal
protocol makes use of:
● Methods for descriptive terminology management.
● Methods of corpus design and data mining in “small corpora” and “big data”.
● Methods of corpus analysis applied to specialized language.
● Web development technologies and NLP.
All the dataset resulting from this project will be provided in open repositories.
4. Concluding remarks
In the previous sections we have outlined the broad lines of the DIGITENDER research project
with which we have very recently begun to work. Our project aims to contribute to filling a gap, as we
will not only publish resources on women’s health issues (those already published as well as new ones
to complete the series), but also on the domains of the terminological dictionaries we have already
constructed, namely, economics, finance, law, the natural stone industry, human rights, marketing and
advertising, banking and the stock exchange. This project is based on the premise that women and men
are equal, so this must be reflected in our specialized spoken and written language, in the terminology
we use and, therefore, in the linguistic resources we produce, because when something is not named,
it does not exist. This applies to some terms that are not listed in their feminine version in Spanish in
term banks widely used by translators, linguists and the general public.
In recent years, institutions and companies have adopted semantic web technologies and introduced
Artificial Intelligence applications in their processes. We have also observed a strong trend towards
open data formats for the publication of datasets, since this translates into a fluid exchange of
information with other institutions, organizations or companies. In this context, Linked Data emerges
as an interesting initiative that proposes a set of good practices to follow in the effective publishing,
sharing and connecting of such data [10]. The use of these technologies is growing all the time as they
allow computers and people to work together. Linked data, in this context, is the semantic web’s way
of linking the various data that are distributed across the web. The WHealth collection will be adapted
to be part of the Linked Open Data Cloud, thereby overcoming the weaknesses of the strongly lexically
anchored relationships that characterize traditional terminologies.
Acknowledgements
This publication forms part of the research project “Digitisation, processing and online publication of
open, multilingual and gender-sensitive terminology resources in the digital society (DIGITENDER)”
(TED2021-130040B-C21), funded by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Agencia Estatal de
Investigación (10.13039/501100011033) and by the European Union “NextGenerationEU”/Plan de
Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia.
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