Guess Me if You Can: Acronym Disambiguation for Enterprises

Yang Li, Bo Zhao, Ariel Fuxman, Fangbo Tao


Abstract
Acronyms are abbreviations formed from the initial components of words or phrases. In enterprises, people often use acronyms to make communications more efficient. However, acronyms could be difficult to understand for people who are not familiar with the subject matter (new employees, etc.), thereby affecting productivity. To alleviate such troubles, we study how to automatically resolve the true meanings of acronyms in a given context. Acronym disambiguation for enterprises is challenging for several reasons. First, acronyms may be highly ambiguous since an acronym used in the enterprise could have multiple internal and external meanings. Second, there are usually no comprehensive knowledge bases such as Wikipedia available in enterprises. Finally, the system should be generic to work for any enterprise. In this work we propose an end-to-end framework to tackle all these challenges. The framework takes the enterprise corpus as input and produces a high-quality acronym disambiguation system as output. Our disambiguation models are trained via distant supervised learning, without requiring any manually labeled training examples. Therefore, our proposed framework can be deployed to any enterprise to support high-quality acronym disambiguation. Experimental results on real world data justified the effectiveness of our system.
Anthology ID:
P18-1121
Volume:
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Iryna Gurevych, Yusuke Miyao
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1308–1317
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1121
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P18-1121
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Li, Bo Zhao, Ariel Fuxman, and Fangbo Tao. 2018. Guess Me if You Can: Acronym Disambiguation for Enterprises. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1308–1317, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Guess Me if You Can: Acronym Disambiguation for Enterprises (Li et al., ACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1121.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P18-1121.mp4