Automatic Acronym Acquisition and Term Variation Management within Domain-Specific Texts

In this paper we present a framework for the effective management of terms and their variants that are automatically acquired from domain-specific texts. In our approach, the term variant recognition is incorporated in the automatic term retrieval process by taking into account orthographical, morphological, syntactic, lexico-semantic and pragmatic term variations. In particular, we address acronyms as a common way of introducing term variants in scientific papers. We describe a method for the automatic acquisition of newly introduced acronyms and the mapping to their ‘meanings’, i.e. the corresponding terms. The proposed three-step procedure is based on morpho-syntactic constraints that are commonly used in acronym definitions. First, acronym definitions containing an acronym and the corresponding term are retrieved. These two elements are matched in the second step by performing morphological analysis of words and combining forms constituting the term. The problems of acronym variation and acronym ambiguity are addressed in the third step by establishing classes of term variants that correspond to specific concepts. We present the results of the acronym acquisition in the domain of molecular biology: the precision of the method ranged from 94% to 99% depending on the size of the corpus used for evaluation, whilst the recall was 73%. * This research is a part of the BioPATH research project coordinated by LION BioScience (http://www.lionbioscience.com) and funded by German Ministry of Research.