Semantically-Enabled Context-Aware Abbreviations Expansion in the Clinical Domain

Abbreviations (aka acronym, shorthand, initialism) constitute an important part of the textual description of a clinical study. However, detecting their meaning may be rather difficult not only for software agents but also humans since a considerable amount of them is not accompanied by their long form (aka expansion), while, in general, every abbreviation has more than one possible meaning (aka sense) on average. Moreover, even in cases that the abbreviations are specified in the document, detecting their expansion may be still difficult due to partial or non-similarity among them. For this purpose a system has been developed for detecting the meaning of abbreviations used in clinical studies. In the background innovative algorithms and techniques have been used for both abbreviation recognition and suggestion purposes. The evaluation of the system developed was based on an abbreviations-annotated corpus of clinical studies developed in close collaboration with clinical experts.