Simulation and annotation of global acronyms

Motivation: Global acronyms are used in written text without their formal definitions. This makes it difficult to automatically interpret their sense as acronyms tend to be ambiguous. Supervised machine learning approaches to sense disambiguation require large training datasets. In clinical applications, large datasets are difficult to obtain due to patient privacy. Manual data annotation creates an additional bottleneck. Results: We proposed an approach to automatically modifying scientific abstracts to (1) simulate global acronym usage and (2) annotate their senses without the need for external sources or manual intervention. We implemented it as a web-based application, which can create large datasets that in turn can be used to train supervised approaches to word sense disambiguation of biomedical acronyms. Availability: https://datainnovation.cardiff.ac.uk/acronyms