Traitement des sigles dans le dictionnaire d'abrégements on line Acronym Finder

Abstract

Initialisms, seen as a lexical reduction phenomenon, are frequently considered an obstacle to reading comprehension, in particular for laymen and undergraduate students. However, it is a phenomenon more and more frequent in all LSP (telecommunications, computer science, medicine, biochemistry, and economics, just to mention a few). As a result of this proliferation, online dictionaries have come out during the last years in order to store the great amount of abbreviations both in general language and specialized language, e.g.: Acronym Finder, Acronym Server, Wiley InterScience, Acronyma, AbbreviationZ, Siglas, etc. All these resources frequently use the web as a corpus to search the lexical reduction forms. Other type of resources have come out before, which we also should keep in mind, i.e., those dictionaries published in paper, e.g.: Alvar (1983), Martínez de Sousa (1984), Carton (1987), Pugh (1987), Bonk (2003), etc. The main goal of this paper is to determine the management of abbreviations in the online dictionary Acronym Finder, since a lack of information about these units has been detected. The specific goal is to establish an entry record model to store and describe the different types of lexical reduction; that is, initialisms, acronyms, abbreviations, etc. 103 This work is divided into three parts, namely: introduction, methodology, and analysis and results. With regard to methodology, Acronym Finder has been described. Then, its macrostructure has been analyzed. Results that show the present or absent terminological information in this dictionary are discussed. Finally, conclusions are presented and an entry data model to gather and store lexical reduction units in online dictionaries is proposed.