Better access to terminology for crisis communications

Abstract

Crisis management depends on efficient communications with professional staff and with people who are affected by the crisis. The correct interpretation of general language and technical terms is crucial to take good actions and to save valuable time. To reduce the risk of misunderstandings we need a well-established crisis management terminology. Several collections of terms have been prepared for hazard areas such as pollution, radiation, fire safety, and dangerous goods. Today such terminologies can be provided on different websites, depending on how the national crisis management is organised. This distribution and a variation of different formats and user interfaces can make them hard to use. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to enable the term definition retrieval from a selection of terminologies directly from the text where the term is used. Initial experiments show that this approach can save time both for the retrieval and for the maintenance of terminologies. People involved in training and planning can benefit from access to definitions directly from the text of online documents. Terminology maintainers can benefit from the automated generation of internal links in the terminology so that the terms used in the definition of the other terms are automatically linked.