Problems faced by international standardization bodies become more and more crucial as the number and the size of the standards they produce increase. Sometimes, also, the lack of coordination among the committees in charge of the development of standards may lead to overlaps, mistakes or incompatibilities in the documents. The aim of this study is to present a methodology enabling an automatic extraction of the technical concepts (terms) found in normative documents, through the use of semantic tools coming from the field of language processing. The first part of the paper provides a description of the standardization world, its structure, its way of working and the problems faced; we then introduce the concepts of semantic annotation, information extraction and the software tools available in this domain. The next section explains the concept of ontology and its potential use in the field of standardization. We propose here a methodology enabling the extraction of technical information from a given normative corpus, based on a semantic annotation process done according to reference ontologies. The application to the ISO 15531 MANDATE corpus provides a first use case of the methodology described in this paper. The paper ends with the description of the first experimental results produced by this approach, and with some issues and perspectives, notably its application to other standards and, or Technical Committees and the possibility offered to create pre-defined technical dictionaries of terms.
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