Terminology, Cognition, and Artificial Intelligence: New Intersections

Artificial intelligence (AI) has burst onto the scene in many areas of today's society, including multilingual communication and, unsurprisingly, terminology, understood as the study of the terms and concepts of specialized fields. This Research Topic aims to explore the intersection of AI and terminology, with a particular focus on the cognitive and linguistic processes underlying specialized language use, term creation, knowledge representation, and terminography. In doing so, it seeks to bring together interdisciplinary research to examine how AI is reshaping the cognitive landscape of terminology and specialized communication.

Terminology research provides a rich and underexplored terrain for psychological inquiry: it sits at the intersection of conceptualization, categorization, and specialized communication—core domains of the psychology of language. AI brings a transformative dimension to these processes, inviting new questions about meaning, knowledge, and cognition.

This Research Topic welcomes work in cognitive, computational, and neuroscientific approaches to language processing, especially in the context of human–AI interaction. We invite contributions addressing questions including, but not limited to:

• How can AI be integrated into existing terminology management tools to enhance automation, consistency, and knowledge representation?
• How can humans and AI collaborate in terminology workflows (e.g., term extraction, identification of interlinguistic equivalents, definition crafting, etc.)?
• In what ways does AI differ from, or complement, corpus analysis and other tools in assisting terminologists?
• Can AI models capture the conceptual depth of terms as humans do?
• To what extent can AI systems detect or represent subtle shifts in conceptual boundaries?
• What does AI’s handling of terminology reveal about human cognitive mechanisms?
• How does AI reshape the cognitive workload and decision-making processes of terminologists?
• What are the implications of AI for cognitive theories of terminology?
• How can AI tools help identify, model, or predict conceptual and denominative variation across domains, languages, or communities of practice?
• What are the multilingual and cross-cultural dimensions of AI-assisted terminology?
• How does terminology evolve when AI systems generate or disseminate new terms in scientific or technical communication?
• How accurate, consistent, and context-appropriate is the use of specialized terminology in AI-generated texts?
• Which are the ethical, cognitive, and social implications of AI-assisted terminology?

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Registered Report
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Cognitive Linguistics, terminology, Language and Cognition, Human-AI interaction

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.