Spotting Acronyms and Initialisms with the Help of Informatics

Abstract The growing popularity of streaming services has led to innumerable audiovisual material available for the audience. As movies, documentaries, or TV shows are part of the entertainment industry, they aim at reaching viewers worldwide with the help of dubbed and subtitled versions. Our aim is to collect the acronyms used in the transcripts/subtitles of several American political TV shows (24, Designated Survivor, House of Cards, and The West Wing) and analyse their translated versions into Hungarian. However, the strenuous activity of opening each subtitle file one by one and browsing through them to spot and collect the acronyms and initialisms would result in countless mouse clicks. Hence, a specific software (SRT Manager) was designed to speed up the process. As the majority of definitions regarding acronyms and initialisms focus on the fact that they result from the combination of at least two capital letters, once the software gets the input (multiple subtitle files of entire seasons), it provides all the consecutive two- or more capital letter instances (with or without periods) found in the raw data, such as AA or A.A. Further statistical data (the source file of each instance, counting all unique values and numbering occurrences, and adding sample lines from the subtitle) also saves a lot of time and energy, as it can easily be exported to spreadsheet programs for further data analysis.