usageterm

Usageterm is a label used in corpus linguistics and natural language processing to denote a category describing how a word or phrase is used within a specific context. It is not a fixed standard but a pragmatic label that annotation projects attach to tokens to indicate usage type, sense, function, or pragmatic force.

In typical annotation schemes, a token may be assigned a usage term such as financial_institution for “bank” in a banking context, or river_bank in a geographic context, allowing researchers to analyze polysemy and sense distributions.

Usage terms facilitate downstream tasks like sense disambiguation, lexicography, or sociolinguistic analysis, and can be used as features in supervised learning to predict meaning or function.

Naming conventions vary by project. Some schemas use the literal label “usageterm” as a field name; others use “UsageTerm” or “usage_term” to store the category. The concept emphasizes the proximate linguistic function rather than the surface form.

Examples: The noun “bank” with usage terms: “financial_institution” vs “geographic_formation.” The verb “run” with usage terms: “motion” vs “management” in phrases like “run a business.”

See also sense tagging, word sense disambiguation, semantic tagging, corpus linguistics, annotation schema.