Identification and characterization of nested-abbreviated terms in scientific discourse

This paper analyzes nested-abbreviated terms from a linguistic perspective by describing their morphological, syntactic, and semantic features for terminology purposes. Nested-abbreviated terms can be considered as abbreviated forms, either initialisms or acronyms, which have within their meaning another abbreviated term. To carry out the analysis, 433 nested-abbreviated terms were extracted from two specialized dictionaries in English. Data analysis showed that, from the morphological and semantic perspective, nested-abbreviated terms behave like typical abbreviations. Important differences were found from a syntactic standpoint where nested abbreviated terms behave as premodifiers in the noun phrase (NP) in 98.93% of the cases. As this is the first time nested-abbreviated terms are studied, they were not only described but also analyzed and defined. Although the percentage of nested-abbreviated terms obtained from the dictionaries is relatively low, less than 1% of total abbreviations, it was found that it is highly relevant to study this growing phenomenon in specialized languages for terminology extraction, as well as for other purposes.