A term recognition approach to acronym recognition

Abstract

We present a term recognition approach to extract acronyms and their definitions from a large text collection. Parenthetical expressions appearing in a text collection are identified as potential acronyms. Assuming terms appearing frequently in the proximity of an acronym to be the expanded forms (definitions) of the acronyms, we apply a term recognition method to enumerate such candidates and to measure the likelihood scores of the expanded forms. Based on the list of the expanded forms and their likelihood scores, the proposed algorithm determines the final acronym-definition pairs. The proposed method combined with a letter matching algorithm achieved 78% precision and 85% recall on an evaluation corpus with 4,212 acronym-definition pairs.