17. A computer implemented method of extracting a list of candidate multi-word technical terms from an input text file, a multi-word technical term being a string of at least two words having a particular meaning in some technical field, said method comprising the computer implemented steps of: storing a stoplist of tokens which are assumed to not occur in multi-word technical terms, a token being a word, character or string of characters delimited by blanks and/or punctuation; storing a maximum length parameter specifying a maximum number of token in any candidate multi-word technical term to be extracted; extracting text fragments from an input text file by identifying delimiting tokens in the input text file at least in part by identifying as a delimiting token each token in the input text file which is the same as a token in the stored stoplist, the identified delimiting tokens defining text fragments therebetween; deriving from the extracted text fragments all possible subsequences of tokens having a length of at least two tokens and no more than a maximum number of tokens specified by the stored maximum length parameter; testing each of the derived subsequences against at least one filtering condition; and creating a sublist of the derived subsequences which pass the at least one filtering condition, the created sublist being the list of candidate multi-word technical terms.
17. A computer implemented method of extracting a list of candidate multi-word technical terms from an input text file, a multi-word technical term being a string of at least two words having a particular meaning in some technical field, said method comprising the computer implemented steps of: storing a stoplist of tokens which are assumed to not occur in multi-word technical terms, a token being a word, character or string of characters delimited by blanks and/or punctuation; storing a maximum length parameter specifying a maximum number of token in any candidate multi-word technical term to be extracted; extracting text fragments from an input text file by identifying delimiting tokens in the input text file at least in part by identifying as a delimiting token each token in the input text file which is the same as a token in the stored stoplist, the identified delimiting tokens defining text fragments therebetween; deriving from the extracted text fragments all possible subsequences of tokens having a length of at least two tokens and no more than a maximum number of tokens specified by the stored maximum length parameter; testing each of the derived subsequences against at least one filtering condition; and creating a sublist of the derived subsequences which pass the at least one filtering condition, the created sublist being the list of candidate multi-word technical terms. 21. A computer implemented method as defined in claim 17 wherein the testing step includes the step of testing each of the derived subsequences against a grammatical constraint filtering condition.