Building an abbreviation dictionary using a term recognition approach.
BACKGROUND
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.


BACKGROUND
The implementations and supplementary information are available at our web site: http://www.chokkan.org/research/acromine/
Okazaki
Naoaki
N
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8651, Japan. okazaki@mi.ci.i.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Ananiadou
Sophia
S
D000004:Abbreviations as Topic; D000043:Abstracting and Indexing / Q000379:methods*; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003628:Database Management Systems; D004014:Dictionaries as Topic; D004282:Documentation / Q000379:methods*; D016239:MEDLINE; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*