Developing and Evaluating an Auto-retrieval Algorithm for Abbreviations in Academic Articles

Summary The purpose of this study was to develop an automated acquisition support for the semantics of abbreviations and evaluate its performance with respect to academic articles. Our goal was to support the maintenance of an institution-specific semantics inventory for abbreviations on a continuous basis. We retrieved articles from MEDLINE with the keyword “Liver ［MeS H］ ,” and 100 abstracts were randomly selected. Abbreviations and their full forms were retrieved using original Java software based on the following rules. （1） Searching the parentheses in the abstracts, the words inside the parentheses were retrieved as “INNER” and the words in front of the parentheses were retrieved as “OUTER.”2） Matching rules, such as whether the first characters of INNER and OU TER were the same. （3） If the words satisfied the conditions stated at （2） , INNER was saved as the abbreviation and OUTER as the full form. Performance was manually evaluated by two graduate students and a radiologist. Of the 165 pairs of abbreviations and full forms that were obtained, 145 （87.9％） constituted correct matches.