LFXtractor: Text chunking for long form detection from biomedical text

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel method to detect the corresponding long forms (LFs) of short forms (SFs) from biomedical text. The proposed method is differentiated from others as follows: it incorporates lexical analysis techniques into supervised learning for extracting abbreviations; it utilises text-chunking techniques to identify LFs of abbreviations; it significantly improves recall. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms the leading abbreviation algorithms, ExtractAbbrev, ALICE and Acrophile and a collocation-based approach at least by 4.8, 6.0, 9.0 and 6.0%, respectively, in both precision and recall on the Gold Standard Development corpus.