Clustering Acronyms in Biomedical Text for Disambiguation

Given the increasing number of neologisms in biomedicine (names of genes, diseases, molecules, etc.), the rate of acronyms used in literature also increases. Existing acronym dictionaries cannot keep up with the rate of new creations. Thus, discovering and disambiguating acronyms and their expanded forms are essential aspects of text mining and terminology management. We present a method for clustering long forms identified by an acronym recognition method. Applying the acronym recognition method to MEDLINE abstracts, we obtained a list of short/long forms. The recognized short/long forms were classified by a biologist to construct an evaluation set for clustering sets of similar long forms. We observed five types of term variation in the evaluation set and defined four similarity measures to gathers the similar long forms (i.e., orthographic, morphological, syntactic, lexico semantic variants, nested abbreviations). The complete-link clustering with the four similarity measures achieved 87.5% precision and 84.9% recall on the evaluation set.