A Quantitative Analysis Of Syntactic Patterns Of English-Chinese Maritime Terms

Terminology is regarded carrier of knowledge in a special field, whose creation, popularization and extinction can dynamically reveal the development and evolution of a particular subject. Meanwhile, as a knowledge source, terminology database offers great supports for the researchers to obtain professional knowledge conveniently. Terminology extraction is the core technique in building a corpora and it is also a basic research subject of Natural Language Processing. However, terminology extraction is a tough job involving amounts of work load. Thus how to extract terminology quickly and precisely is the key problem. The present study is thus designed to serve for terminology extraction with the aim:1) give a quantitative analysis of the syntactic patterns of English-Chinese maritime terms;2) obtain the syntactic equivalence degree between English and Chinese maritime terms and then apply the results to maritime terminology extraction.Two-word and three-word English term pairs are randomly chosen as basic analysis data in the present study. Via POS-tagging, the author first obtains the syntactic patterns of English maritime terms and then investigates in the corresponding Chinese terms. Secondly, based on Translation Equivalence theory, the author gets the equivalent degree of the syntactic patterns.For the whole study, the author gets the following results:the most frequent syntactic patterns which covering over80%for two-word English terms are NN+NN, JJ+NN, VBG+NN, VBN+NN and their most probable corresponding Chinese patterns which covering about70%are NN+NN, NN, VV+NN, JJ+NN, NN+VV, NN+NN+NN. The most frequent syntactic patterns which covering over70%for three-word English terminology are JJ+NN+NN, NN+NN+NN, NN+IN+NN, JJ+JJ+NN, NN+VBG+NN, NN+JJ+NN and their most probable corresponding Chinese patterns which covering about70%are NN+NN, NN+NN+NN, NN, VV+NN, NN+VV+NN, JJ+NN, JJ+NN+NN.