Optimizing Contextonym Analysis for Terminological Definition Writing

To write terminological definitions that meet user needs, terminologists require methods that help them effectively select the most relevant information to be included in a definition. In this sense, a corpus technique that can be useful for the definition of terms is contextonym analysis. It involves the quantitative analysis of the other terms with which the term to be defined usually co-occurs (i.e., its contextonyms), regardless of any syntactic or semantic relationship. This paper presents a study conducted to determine the optimal configuration for extracting contextonyms for the creation of terminological definitions. More specifically, this study aims to create a word sketch column in Sketch Engine that lists contextonyms, offering a user-friendly method for their extraction. This study has identified that the optimal context window for extracting contextonyms in the form of word sketches in English to inform definition writing is 50 tokens, and that these contextonyms should be ranked by frequency.