In recent decades, quite a few studies have been conducted focusing on the analysis of academic discourse. Academic Slovene includes various genres, especially professional-scientific texts created in the academic environment, i.e. it includes everything from seminar papers and student reports to diploma and master's theses and doctoral dissertations.
In my master's thesis I analyse terminology in Slovene PhD theses from the field of computer science and informatics, studying how often terms appear in three dissertations in the field of computing and information technology, and determining whether the terminology in certain parts of a dissertation is more condensed than in other parts. Furthermore, by comparing the terms extracted from the selected doctoral theses with the available terminological sources, I determine the extent to which users of terminology can help themselves with freely available bilingual dictionaries or manuals covering the field of computer science.
In the research, I asked three questions: What is the average terminological density of dissertations? Is the average terminology density in abstracts higher than that of the main text? What share of the extracted terms are included in online dictionaries? In addition to the above-mentioned questions, I was also interested in which word-type patterns of terms occur most often and what the average length of a term is. The research consisted of the following steps: first, I marked the terms in the dissertations manually, then I extracted the marked terms and analysed the lists of terms from each dissertation.
The results of the analysis show that the terminological density of the entire documents is 25%, which is quite high and comparable to related studies. When analysing individual parts of the dissertation, I noticed that the most terminologically dense part in all documents is the abstract, in which the terminological density is 30%. As far as the length of terms is concerned, most terms are two-word, followed by one-word and three-word terms. The longest identified term comprised nine words, and the average length of the term is 2.67. One-word terms are most frequently written as nouns and two-word term most often occur in the pattern of an adjective and noun. About 13% of all the extracted terms could be found in online dictionaries and terminology sources for Slovene.
To conclude, the research shows that doctoral dissertations, especially abstracts, in the field of computer science and informatics are a rich source of terminology and can serve as an excellent source for further management of (computer) terminology and creation of new terminological dictionaries. Namely, the research also shows the lack of appropriate Slovenian terminological resources for the field of computer science.
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