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Term Settings

  • Updated

When you create a term in the Dashboard for the first time, you'll need to add some basic information for your term. After that, you can use the Terms section to view and edit additional aspects of the term.

Basic Term Settings

Field

Description

Term Name

The actual word or phrase that you want to manage. For example, "jabberwocky."

Check Inflections

When this is selected, Acrolinx looks for other linguistic forms of the term, such as singular and plural forms for nouns or present tense and past tense forms for verbs. In general, you want to turn this on for common words like "email," but turn it off for product or company names like "Acrolinx."

Acrolinx can check inflections for common words that you would find in a dictionary. For new or industry-specific words like "transponder," you might notice that the option to check inflections isn't available. In that case, you can add other forms (like "transponders") separately as linked terms.

Language

Defines the language of the current term. To change the language, select a new language from the dropdown.

Domain

Lets you categorize terms in various ways. Some people like to organize their domains by interface area or product line. In any case, the way you organize your terms should match your checking requirements.

For example, you might have one domain for technical terms, and one for marketing terms. You could then use the technical domain when checking technical documentation and developer-oriented content, and use the marketing domain when checking marketing content and blog posts.

Domains also play a functional role in the Acrolinx Platform. If you use Checking Profiles, you can use the "Term Sets" page to quickly add term sets that load terms based on domains. With Targets enabled, you can add one or more domains to your Target in the Words and Phrases goal. That way, your writers will get the Terminology guidance they need.

In the Terminology Manager, a term can belong to different domains. You can add terms to a domain using the batch edit function or the term import wizard. Use the category manager to add, rename, or remove domains. The Terminology Manager also supports a hierarchical structure for domains.

Status

A term qualifier that indicates approval, acceptability, or applicability in a given context. In Acrolinx, a Status is a system category that's based on a subset of the statuses that are listed in the ISO standard 12620: A.2.9. You can set the status of a term using the Term Page, the Batch Edit function, or the term import wizard.

A term can have five type of status:

  • Proposed - terms that haven’t been decided on yet. Acrolinx doesn't check for proposed terms.

  • Deprecated - terms that should never be used in your organization's content. Acrolinx always checks for deprecated terms. The Sidebar usually provides preferred or admitted suggestions if Acrolinx finds any deprecated terms.

  • Preferred - terms that are always OK to use for written documents in your organization. Acrolinx will suggest preferred terms to your writers.

  • Admitted - terms that writers should only use in specific contexts, which means these terms need special attention. With Targets enabled, you can decide if admitted terms affect the Acrolinx Score. Learn how in Words and Phrases and How Acrolinx Scores Are Calculated.

  • Non-Term - terms that aren't relevant for your terminology, but should stay in the database to make sure that they don't get submitted again.

    The Non-Term status has two substatuses:

    • Stopword ensures that Acrolinx doesn't identify words or phrases that include the non-term as potential discovered terms during the Term Discovery process.

    • No-single-term indicates that Acrolinx shouldn't discover the non-term, but that it can discover words or phrases that include the non-term.

The Acrolinx Platform uses the status values to determine which terms to add for checking. Acrolinx always includes terms with the status Preferred, Admitted, and Deprecated in a check.

In Acrolinx Integrations, the Status defines how the Sidebar highlights terminology issues. Acrolinx always highlights Deprecated terms. It also highlights Admitted terms, but these might not affect the Score depending on your configurations.

Advanced Term Settings

Most term settings are easy to understand and you can update them in one step. However, some settings can include multiple steps when editing a term. Before you change these settings, it’s important to understand how these settings work.

Tab

Description

Basic Information

This tab contains the following basic settings that you need to manage terms:

  • Status

  • Information on whether the term is a head term

  • Image

  • Definition

  • Source of definition

  • Domain

For more information, see Term Status, Head Term and Domain.

Linked Terms

This tab contains an editable list of all terms that are linked to the current term. These terms could be synonyms or translations of the current term. For more information, see Link and Unlink Terms.

Linguistic Information

This tab contains linguistic settings that affect how Acrolinx analyzes the term when users check text with an Acrolinx Integration:

  • Language - Defines language of the current term. Acrolinx uses this attribute to load terms into the correct language server for linguistic analysis.

    The Terminology Manager can store terms in any language. However, the Acrolinx Platform can only check or analyze terms in languages that have the corresponding language server component running. To get an overview of the languages Acrolinx supports, visit the Acrolinx Language Support Matrix

    To change the language, select a new language from the dropdown.

    Warning

    You can manage the languages of your terminology database with the Category Manager.

  • Check inflections - Use this setting to enable Acrolinx linguistic intelligence, and check the inflected forms of a word within your term.

    The check inflections option is available as long as there’s a language server running that can process the language of a term. For example, you can only select check inflections for German terms when a German language server is running.

    After you select check inflections and configure the other linguistic settings, Acrolinx saves your settings, even if you stop the responsible language server after. However, you'll need to start the language server again before you can change a word to inflect and the morphosyntactic restriction.

  • Words to inflect - If you’ve enabled Check inflections, you can use the radio buttons to select the word that you want to inflect.

  • Morphosyntactic restriction (MSR) - Helps limit term checking to only certain inflected forms. For example, if you’ve selected the word "load," you can choose one of the following MSRs:

    • Noun to restrict the check to the singular and plural form load and loads only.

    • Verb to restrict the check to the verb forms load, loads, loaded, loading.

    Tip

    Acrolinx recommends the standard morphosyntactic restriction type. If you use a strict morphosyntactic restriction, non-issues can result.

Custom Information

This tab contains custom fields that are specific to your workflow. Acrolinx has included some sample custom fields to help you get started.

Advanced Information

This tab contains settings for configuring how Acrolinx treats variants of the current term. Under normal circumstances, you don’t need to change settings on this tab.

Administrative Information

This tab shows a list of identifiers for the current term and details about who created and changed the term. You can also add comments to the current term and review comments that other users have added.

You'll see the following types of identifiers:

  • Customer identifiers - Keep identifiers generated by another system. You can use the following fields to store custom identifiers:

    • Term Entry ID

    • Term ID

    You can also edit custom identifiers in the Terminology Manager interface. If you don’t have your own identifiers, a 13-digit number is automatically generated and stored in this field.

  • Universally unique identifiers - Generate and store a universally unique identifier (UUID) for term entries and individual terms.

    You can use UUIDs to ensure that your terminology identifiers remain unique when transferring terms between different installations.

    • Term Entry UUID

    • Term UUID

Notice

Terminology requires all term entries and terms to have a UUID. If your terms don’t have UUIDs, Acrolinx generates one for you when a term is created.

In addition to the standard identifiers, each term also has a term database ID. The term database ID is an identifier assigned to the term by the database schema. The Acrolinx Integrations and the Term Browser use term database ID as a reference when linking to term help files.

However, the term database ID isn’t unique across different installations. When importing or exporting terms, use the term UUID or your own term ID instead of the term database ID.