Linking Images and Words: the Description of Specialized Concepts

A crucial issue in terminology management is how specialized concepts should be represented so as to provide the user with an adequate understanding of their meaning as well as sufficient knowledge of their location within the general knowledge structure of a scientific or technical domain. Such a conceptual representation should contain information in various formats. In this regard, linguistic and graphical descriptions of specialized entities play a major role in knowledge representation, especially when both converge to highlight the multidimensional nature of concepts as well as the conceptual relations within a specialized domain. In this article, we explore the nature of the links between the linguistic and graphical description of specialized concepts. In a multimodal conceptual description, we believe that the structured information in terminographic definitions should mesh with the visual information in images for a better understanding of complex and dynamic concept systems.