Terminological work aims to identify knowledge about terms in specialised texts in order to compile dictionaries, glossaries or ontologies. Searching for definitions about the terms that terminographers intend to define is therefore an essential task. This search can be done in specialised corpus, where they usually appear in definitional contexts, i.e. text fragments where an author explicitly defines a term. We present a research focused on the automatic extraction of those definitional contexts. The methodology includes three different processes: the extraction of definitional patterns, the automatic filtering of non-relevant contexts, and the automatic identification of constitutive elements, i.e., terms and definitions.

This research has been developed by the sponsorship of the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT), the DGAPA-UNAM, as well as the Macro Project Tecnologías para la Universidad de la Información y la Computación, UNAM.