The Pro.Bio.Dic. (Prototype of a Bioethics Dictionary) project: Building a corpus of popular and specialized bioethics texts

Abstract

This paper reports on an ongoing, long-term research project in the field of medical ethics and bioethics conducted by a multidisciplinary team combining medical, linguistic, IT and philosophical research interests: the Prototype of a Bioethics Dictionary (Pro.bio.dic). Having already outlined (Vicentini et al. 2011) the reasons and needs to both redefine and update the lexicographic material available so as to provide a corpus-based collection of the English terms of contemporary bioethics to be published on a web platform, the Pro.bio.dic has now entered the key stage of corpus-building. This stage requires establishing the criteria involved in creating a large, statistically-valid reference corpus of both specialized and popular bioethics texts, to be processed by means of text-mining and machine-learning techniques, and to serve as the basis from which the entries of the electronic online tool described as the Pro.bio.dic will be drawn by means of concordancing software.

Keywords

• bioethics
• English lexicography
• corpora
• corpus linguistics
• online dictionary