Andi Cupallari


2021

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ABB-BERT: A BERT model for disambiguating abbreviations and contractions
Prateek Kacker | Andi Cupallari | Aswin Subramanian | Nimit Jain
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON)

Abbreviations and contractions are commonly found in text across different domains. For example, doctors’ notes contain many contractions that can be personalized based on their choices. Existing spelling correction models are not suitable to handle expansions because of many reductions of characters in words. In this work, we propose ABB-BERT, a BERT-based model, which deals with an ambiguous language containing abbreviations and contractions. ABB-BERT can rank them from thousands of options and is designed for scale. It is trained on Wikipedia text, and the algorithm allows it to be fine-tuned with little compute to get better performance for a domain or person. We are publicly releasing the training dataset for abbreviations and contractions derived from Wikipedia.