COMPOSITE SEMANTIC RELATIONS BETWEEN ACADEMIC CONCEPTS IN SEMANTIC NETWORKS

Maxim Latu
 Assoc. Prof. Ph.D., Pyatigorsk State University, Russia, Laatuu@yandex.ru

Abstract
The studies of academic knowledge organization principles and its representation in language appear to be of great significance today because they shed light on some fundamental theoretical issues related to the language of science as well as contribute to some applied research objectives, such as designing terminological semantic networks and electronic dictionaries based on them, ontologies, expert knowledge systems, natural language processing, etc. Academic concepts are expressed by technical terms that constitute the terminology of a certain field of knowledge. Their arrangement within such a terminology system represents a model of the fragment of objective reality (see Leychik 2006). As C. Khoo and N. Jin-Cheon (2006) say, “while concepts are the building blocks of knowledge, relations act as the cement that links up concepts into knowledge structures”. The systematic character of technical terms can be modeled and studied by means of a terminological semantic network that can illustrate the adjacent concepts. One of the key problems here is what the prototypic semantic relations are that link two concepts that belong to the same category or different categories.
This paper is devoted to the study of certain prototypic semantic relations between two vertices that are linked to one and the same action (that may be expressed by a technical term and represent another vertex of the category Process or by a word of general vocabulary that is not part of the structure). In this respect their relationship is predetermined by the existence of such action and is mediated by it. Since the two vertices are linked to this mediating vertex by different types of semantic relations (the agent of the action – “Ag”, the instrument of the action “Inst”, etc.), the relationship between them appears to be composite based on their roles in the action. Thus, we define and discuss specificity of the existing types of such composite semantic relations that link the agent of the action and its instrument “AgInst”, the instrument of the action and its object – “InstObj”, etc. The peculiarities of their representation in specialized texts and the structure of the technical terms are analyzed. I draw most of the examples mainly from the terminologies of nanotechnology and space research, as well as other fields of knowledge when necessary. The technical terms and their definitions were collected from terminological databases, dictionaries and fragments of specialized texts.

Keywords: semantic network, semantic relation, academic concept, technical term, category, definition