Fangbo Tao


2018

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.

2017

A document outlier is a document that substantially deviates in semantics from the majority ones in a corpus. Automatic identification of document outliers can be valuable in many applications, such as screening health records for medical mistakes. In this paper, we study the problem of mining semantically deviating document outliers in a given corpus. We develop a generative model to identify frequent and characteristic semantic regions in the word embedding space to represent the given corpus, and a robust outlierness measure which is resistant to noisy content in documents. Experiments conducted on two real-world textual data sets show that our method can achieve an up to 135% improvement over baselines in terms of recall at top-1% of the outlier ranking.

2016