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

摘要

Initialisms, seen as a lexical reduction phenomenon, are frequently considered an obstacle to readingcomprehension, in particular for laymen and undergraduate students. However, it is a phenomenonmore 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 tostore the great amount of abbreviations both in general language and specialized language, e.g.:Acronym Finder, Acronym Server, Wiley InterScience, Acronyma, AbbreviationZ, Siglas, etc. Allthese resources frequently use the web as a corpus to search the lexical reduction forms. Other typeof resources have come out before, which we also should keep in mind, i.e., those dictionariespublished 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 dictionaryAcronym Finder, since a lack of information about these units has been detected. The specific goal isto establish an entry record model to store and describe the different types of lexical reduction; thatis, initialisms, acronyms, abbreviations, etc.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 beenanalyzed. Results that show the present or absent terminological information in this dictionary arediscussed. Finally, conclusions are presented and an entry data model to gather and store lexicalreduction units in online dictionaries is proposed.