Méta-médiations coopératives en sémantique des termes : un système d’étude et de présentation des sens d’items lexicaux dans divers domaines d’occurrence

In this paper we present the results of the “Onto-terminology of mediation” research project. The project aims at introducing a methodology, a system and, above all, a particular cooperative mode in coping with some terminological issues, in particular, the comparative exploration of the sense of a term in various domains. The use-case concerns the term “mediation”. We have chosen 7 terms addressed by mediation, occurring in five different domains: law, education, communication, language and culture. The suggested approach finds roots in a corpus-based linguistic paradigm. It intends to build up a cooperative platform offering assistance to users preoccupied with the semantics of a term, while that term is used in one of these domains. More concretely, we propose: i. a way of modeling the terminological data, typically extracted from text corpora, ii. an organization of these data into particular knowledge bases and iii. a cooperative manner of presenting them critically. Such presentations may take various forms, the most prominent being the pedagogical one, consisting in producing reasoned discourses on term semantics. In the first part of the paper we discuss not only the interest of the project and its horizon, but also its limits. In the second part, we explain the underlying methodology and outline some possible cooperative semantic scenarios. Finally, in the third part, we describe the use of the developed system through some examples. We conclude with a series of considerations on the transmission and sharing of terminological knowledge, emerging from and shaped by such a cooperative semantic mode.