Typographical emphasis on text is ambiguous I am writing a paper and part of my thesis, and I need some advice to improve the readability of my manuscript(s).

Working in computer science and machine learning, there is a lot of technical stuff going on: I have to write definitions and set the terminology of my work. So, for instance, I have to explain the reader that a training set is a set of example on which my system learns to model some phenomenon.

Now, please, focus on the previous paragraph. As you can see, I used the italics to stress the new piece of terminology, namely the expression “training set”, and to emphasize some other words, namely the word “learn”.  

So, having the same style for these two things, with a different semantics, sounds a little confusing to me (and to my supervisors). And there is a lot of this stuff in my paper/thesis.

How can I improve readability in this respect?

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EDIT. The focus of my question is not if the word "learn" should be emphasized with respect to what it means or not. It is just an example. Idem for the "training set" with respect to the expected background knowledge of the reader. In abstract terms, my question can be generalized to: how to emphasize both the terminology that I am introducing and words that need proper emphasis? A more fitting example could be the following:  

We call training set the set of examples on which a Neural Network learns to model some phenomenon. (omissis) At each timestep, our network has to decide if the symbol will be chosen from the first or the second list. In both cases, it has to decide also which symbol will be chosen.
Perhaps you don't need to italicise the word learn: you could just say "a training set is used to train the system to model the particular phenomenon".

This means that the italics are reserved for the words or phrases that you are setting the precise meaning of.