Clustering acronyms in biomedical text for disambiguation

Naoaki Okazaki, Sophia Ananiadou


Abstract
Given the increasing number of neologisms in biomedicine (names of genes, diseases, molecules, etc.), the rate of acronyms used in literature also increases. Existing acronym dictionaries cannot keep up with the rate of new creations. Thus, discovering and disambiguating acronyms and their expanded forms are essential aspects of text mining and terminology management. We present a method for clustering long forms identified by an acronym recognition method. Applying the acronym recognition method to MEDLINE abstracts, we obtained a list of short/long forms. The recognized short/long forms were classified by abiologist to construct an evaluation set for clustering sets of similar long forms. We observed five types of term variation in the evaluation set and defined four similarity measures to gathers the similar longforms (i.e., orthographic, morphological, syntactic, lexico semantic variants, nested abbreviations). The complete-link clustering with the four similarity measures achieved 87.5% precision and 84.9% recall on the evaluation set.
Anthology ID:
L06-1207
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)
Month:
May
Year:
2006
Address:
Genoa, Italy
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Aldo Gangemi, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/351_pdf.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Naoaki Okazaki and Sophia Ananiadou. 2006. Clustering acronyms in biomedical text for disambiguation. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06), Genoa, Italy. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Clustering acronyms in biomedical text for disambiguation (Okazaki & Ananiadou, LREC 2006)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/351_pdf.pdf