Acronym Madness – Part 2

Toppling the Timescale Part III: Madness in the Methods

The chronology of the geologic timescale’s stratigraphic units has been defi ned by a variety of methods. Over the decades many have waxed and waned in popularity, but at present the most important ones are: (1) radiometric dating, (2) astronomical “tuning,” (3) magnetostratigraphy, and (4) biostratigraphy. Each of these methods assumes deep time and uniformitarianism rather than demonstrating ...

Wireless Dictionary Acronym/Term Acronym Definition Explanation

Madness

here are clouds in the painting, of course. Almost any one of us would have included those clouds, thick with electricity and rainwater. And there is the wheat field, smudged out like an empty palm, orange beneath the storm-stricken sun. Surely, many of us would have insisted on the wheat as well. Through the middle of the wheat, a rutted road slices to the horizon and disappears beneath the cl...

Efficient Acronym-Expansion Matching for Automatic Acronym Acquisition

Acronyms are a very dynamic area of many languages. An efficient dynamic programming algorithm for matching acronyms with their expansions by maximizing a linguistic plausibility score is presented and is found to be very accurate, to =99.6% on a corpus of acronym definitions. Given its high precision, the algorithm can be used as a component in new or existing automatic acronym acquisition sys...

Automatic Acronym Identification and the Creation of an Acronym Database

Over the past few decades there has been an explosion in the number on online technical documents, news stories and other formal documents. Associated with this large increase in documents has come a large increase in the number of acronyms defined. As a result of this there is now a need to create systems capable of automatically identifying acronyms and their meanings in order to help improve...