Use of abbreviations and acronyms is pervasive in clinical reports despite many efforts to limit the use of ambiguous and unsanctioned abbreviations and acronyms. Due to the fact that many abbreviations and acronyms are ambiguous with respect to their sense, complete and accurate text analysis is impossible without identification of the sense that was intended for a given abbreviation or acrony...

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When the Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of a journal changes then it is customary to mark the occasion with an Editorial in the first edition of the journal compiled by the new EIC. So I decided not to do that. This looked as if it would be a momentous year for European Anaesthesiology (EA). I could feel it in my bones, as my grandmother used to say. I decided instead to go for an Editorial mid-year. Th...

Definitions Abbreviation: A shortened form of a word, term or phrase used chiefly in writing to represent the full form (for example: 0 C for degree centigrade, N for nitrogen, ha for hectare, etc.) Acronym: More commonly used in writing and conversation, an acronym is formed by taking the initial letters of a name, term, or title (such as WO for Washington Office, NFS for National Forest Syste...

The paper addresses the problem of extracting acronyms and their expansions from text. We propose a support vector machines (SVM) based approach to deal with the problem. First, all likely acronyms are identified using heuristic rules. Second, expansion candidates are generated from surrounding text of acronyms. Last, SVM model is employed to select the genuine expansions. Analysis shows that t...

We present a term recognition approach to extract acronyms and their definitions from a large text collection. Parenthetical expressions appearing in a text collection are identified as potential acronyms. Assuming terms appearing frequently in the proximity of an acronym to be the expanded forms (definitions) of the acronyms, we apply a term recognition method to enumerate such candidates and ...

This paper describes the progressive performance of JD, a patient with semantic dementia, on acronym categorisation, recognition and reading aloud over a period of 18 months. Most acronyms have orthographic and phonological configurations that are different from English words (BBC, DVD, HIV). While some acronyms, the majority, are regularly pronounced letter by letter, others are pronounced in ...