Abstract
"Bunrui Goihyo" (Word List By Semantic Principles) is one of the most widely used Japanese thesauruses compiled by The National Language Research Institute. This paper discusses its design policies as well as its real lexical descriptions both from an information processing viewpoint and from a viewpoint of terminology. Firstly, its word-classification strategy is discussed. The discussion clarifies the merits and limitations when the thesaurus is applied to information processing tasks such as information retrieval. This paper then focuses on treatment of technical terms. The extensive analysis of its lexical descriptions provides potential justification for its use as a technical-term thesaurus, although it is originally designed as a thesaurus of non-technical terms.
