BADREX: In situ expansion and coreference of biomedical abbreviations using dynamic regular expressions

Abstract: BADREX uses dynamically generated regular expressions to annotate term definition-term abbreviation pairs, and corefers unpaired acronyms and abbreviations back to their initial definition in the text. Against the Medstract corpus BADREX achieves precision and recall of 98% and 97%, and against a much larger corpus, 90% and 85%, respectively. BADREX yields improved performance over previous approaches, requires no training data and allows runtime customisation of its input parameters. BADREX is freely available from https://github.com/philgooch/BADREX-Biomedical-Abbreviation-Expander as a plugin for the General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) framework and is licensed under the GPLv3.