Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio

Terminology and entity annotation tasks in digital-library and corpus-oriented workflows often involve expressions that are discontinuous, overlapping, or partially shared. While several existing annotation environments support span-based and relation-based annotation, discontinuous structures are frequently represented indirectly through workaround mechanisms, such as linking independent spans via auxiliary relations. This may increase annotation complexity and reduce the transparency of the resulting annotation objects. This paper introduces Annotaterm, a lightweight web-based annotation environment designed to support the direct annotation of contiguous, discontinuous, and overlapping terms through a fragment-based interaction model. This model supports simple, composite, and overlapping annotations in a uniform and inspectable way. A preliminary user evaluation with 14 participants suggests that the tool is perceived as suitable for terminology-oriented annotation tasks, particularly for handling overlapping and discontinuous expressions, while also identifying areas for future refinement. The proposed approach contributes both a conceptual model and a practical annotation environment for digital-library and terminology-oriented workflows requiring transparent handling of complex textual structures.

In recent decades, terminology studies have increasingly engaged with findings from cognitive psychology, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis in order to account for variation in term usage, historical change, and context-dependent meaning (Cabré, 1999; Temmerman, 2000). This development has led to the emergence of socio-cognitive approaches to terminology, which challenge classical Wüsterian models of concepts traditionally associated with standardization-oriented terminology work. In particular, prototype-based theories of categorization have been mobilized to argue that many concepts lack clear boundaries and that classical Aristotelian definitions based on necessary and sufficient characteristics are inadequate for describing real-world terminological practice (Lakoff, 1990; Rosch, 1975, 1973). These socio-cognitive insights have contributed significantly to the descriptive analysis of terminological variation and to the discussion of the possible pitfalls of the general theory of terminology. Nevertheless, this paper argues that the theoretical implications of socio-cognitive approaches for concept modeling, ontology design, and terminology management have often been overstated. The central claim we try to defend here is that graded categorization behavior and prototype effects pertain to cognitive access and usage patterns, not to the ontological structure of concepts themselves. Failure to maintain this distinction has often led to an unnecessary dichotomy (classical vs modern terminology, right vs wrong, etc.) with a consequent conceptual confusion and practical difficulties in applied terminology and ontology engineering.