What is Noun Phrase (NP)

This chapter presents the different standardization methods of terms at the two basic approaches of nonlinguistic and linguistic techniques, and sets out to justify the application of processes based on finitestate transducers (FST). Standardization of terms is the procedure of matching and grouping together variants of the same term that are semantically equivalent. A term variant is a text occurrence that is conceptually related to an original term and can be used to search for information in a text database. The uniterm and multiterm variants can be considered equivalent units for the purposes of automatic indexing. This chapter describes the computational and linguistic base of the finite-state approach, with emphasis on the influence of the formal language theory in the standardization process of uniterms and multiterms. The lemmatization and the use of syntactic pattern-matching, through equivalence relations represented in FSTs, are emerging methods for the standardization of terms.