Mark Stevenson
ABSTRACT
Abbreviations are common in biomedical documents and many are ambiguous in the sense that they have several potential expansions. Identifying the correct expansion is necessary for language understanding and important for applications such as document retrieval. Identifying the correct expansion can be viewed as a Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) problem. A WSD system that uses a variety of knowledge sources, including two types of information specific to the biomedical domain, is also described. This system was tested on a corpus of ambiguous abbreviations, created by automatically identifying the correct expansion in Medline abstracts, and found to identify the correct expansion with up to 99% accuracy.
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Index Terms
- Disambiguation of biomedical abbreviations
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