BIOINFORMATICS Building an Abbreviation Dictionary Using a Term Recognition Approach

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