This paper addresses automatic extraction of abbreviations (encompassing acronyms and initialisms) and corresponding long-form expansions from plain unstructured text. We create and are going to release a multilingual resource for abbreviations and their corresponding expansions, built automatically by exploiting Wikipedia redirect and disambiguation pages, that can be used as a benchmark for evaluation. We address a shortcoming of previous work where only the redirect pages were used, and so every abbreviation had only a single expansion, even though multiple different expansions are possible for many of the abbreviations. We also develop a principled machine learning based approach to scoring expansion candidates using different techniques such as indicators of near synonymy, topical relatedness, and surface similarity. We show improved performance over seven languages, including two with a non-Latin alphabet, relative to strong baselines.
Objective: To develop methods that automatically map abbreviations to their full forms in biomedical articles. @PARASPLIT Methods: The authors developed two methods of mapping defined and undefined abbreviations (defined abbreviations are paired with their full forms in the articles, whereas undefined ones are not). For defined abbreviations, they developed a set of pattern-matching rules to map an abbreviation to its full form and implemented the rules into a software program, AbbRE (for “abbreviation recognition and extraction”). Using the opinions of domain experts as a reference standard, they evaluated the recall and precision of AbbRE for defined abbreviations in ten biomedical articles randomly selected from the ten most frequently cited medical and biological journals. They also measured the percentage of undefined abbreviations in the same set of articles, and they investigated whether they could map undefined abbreviations to any of four public abbreviation databases (GenBank LocusLink, swissprot, LRABR of the UMLS Specialist Lexicon, and Bioabacus). @PARASPLIT Results: AbbRE had an average 0.70 recall and 0.95 precision for the defined abbreviations. The authors found that an average of 25 percent of abbreviations were defined in biomedical articles and that of a randomly selected subset of undefined abbreviations, 68 percent could be mapped to any of four abbreviation databases. They also found that many abbreviations are ambiguous (i.e., they map to more than one full form in abbreviation databases). @PARASPLIT Conclusion: AbbRE is efficient for mapping defined abbreviations. To couple AbbRE with abbreviation databases for the mapping of undefined abbreviations, not only exhaustive abbreviation databases but also a method to resolve the ambiguity of abbreviations in the databases are needed. Motivation: Acronyms result from a highly productive type of term variation and trigger the need for an acronym dictionary to establish associations between acronyms and their expanded forms. Results: We propose a novel method for recognizing acronym definitions in a text collection. Assuming a word sequence co-occurring frequently with a parenthetical expression to be a potential expanded form, our method identifies acronym definitions in a similar manner to the statistical term recognition task. Applied to the whole MEDLINE (7 811 582 abstracts), the implemented system extracted 886 755 acronym candidates and recognized 300 954 expanded forms in reasonable time. Our method outperformed base-line systems, achieving 99 precision and 82--95 recall on our evaluation corpus that roughly emulates the whole MEDLINE. Availability and Supplementary information: The implementations and supplementary information are available at our web site: http: www.chokkan.org research acromine Contact: okazaki@mi.ci.i.u-tokyo.ac.jp We implemented a web server for acronym and abbreviation lookup, containing a collection of acronyms and their expansions gathered from a large number of web pages by a heuristic extraction process. Several different extraction algorithms were evaluated and compared. The corpus resulting from the best algorithm is comparable to a high-quality hand-crafted site, but has the potential to be much more inclusive as data from more web pages are processed.  We are presenting work on recognising acronyms of the form Long-Form (Short-Form) such as "International Monetary Fund (IMF)" in millions of news articles in twenty-two languages, as part of our more general effort to recognise entities and their variants in news text and to use them for the automatic analysis of the news, including the linking of related news across languages. We show how the acronym recognition patterns, initially developed for medical terms, needed to be adapted to the more general news domain and we present evaluation results. We describe our effort to automatically merge the numerous long-form variants referring to the same short-form, while keeping non-related long-forms separate. Finally, we provide extensive statistics on the frequency and the distribution of short-form long-form pairs across languages. 