Acronym Disambiguation: A Domain Independent Approach

Abstract: Acronyms are omnipresent. They usually express information that is repetitive and well known. But acronyms can also be ambiguous because there can be multiple expansions for the same acronym. In this paper, we propose a general system for acronym disambiguation that can work on any acronym given some context information. We present methods for retrieving all the possible expansions of an acronym from Wikipedia and AcronymsFinder.com. We propose to use these expansions to collect all possible contexts in which these acronyms are used and then score them using a paragraph embedding technique called Doc2Vec. This method collectively led to achieving an accuracy of 90.9% in selecting the correct expansion for given acronym, on a dataset we scraped from Wikipedia with 707 distinct acronyms and 14,876 disambiguations.