The Multilingual Digital Terminology Today (MDTT) international conference is a new annual event for researchers on Digital Terminology, 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.
The first edition of the MDTT conference, “Multilingual digital terminology today. Design, representation formats and management systems”, was held at the University of Padua and organized by Federica Vezzani, Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, Geneviève Henrot, and Maria Teresa Musacchio, on June 16-17, 2022. In particular, this event was organized around four main research topics: the influence of user requirements analysis for the design and implementation of a new terminological resource, the evaluation of structural resource design approaches, the formats for the optimal representation of terminological data and metadata, and the validation of the ergonomics of specific terminological resources.
A scientific committee of around 30 international experts in the field selected 18 papers accepted after a double-blind review process. A total of 80 participants registered for the conference (47 onsite and 33 online). There was a widespread participation across Europe: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland. There were also participants from Cameroon, Mongolia, South Africa, and USA.
Two keynote speakers, Prof. Rute Costa (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal) and Prof. Roberto Navigli (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy), made two presentations entitled “Transitions en Terminologie” and “Ten Years of BabelNet and Beyond”, respectively. The two talks gave an overview about the evolution of terminology throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and about the evolution of the lexical-semantic knowledge resource that helps to scale tasks and applications to hundreds of languages.
The abstracts will be very soon published in open access format through the CEUR-WS Proceedings platform, and a selection of extended papers will be published as a special issue in the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (DSH) Journal: stay tuned for more information about these publications!
Conference website: http://www.maldura.unipd.it/digital-terminology/
Written by Federica Vezzani and Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio