MadDog: A Web-based System for Acronym Identification and Disambiguation

TL;DR

MadDog is a publicly accessible web-based system that identifies and disambiguates acronyms across multiple domains, addressing a gap in existing tools by offering a unified solution.

Contribution

It introduces the first web-based platform capable of processing acronyms from scientific, biomedical, and general domains, providing a unified and publicly available tool.

Findings

Supports multiple domains including scientific and biomedical

Provides a publicly accessible web interface

Open source code available for community use

Abstract

Acronyms and abbreviations are the short-form of longer phrases and they are ubiquitously employed in various types of writing. Despite their usefulness to save space in writing and reader's time in reading, they also provide challenges for understanding the text especially if the acronym is not defined in the text or if it is used far from its definition in long texts. To alleviate this issue, there are considerable efforts both from the research community and software developers to build systems for identifying acronyms and finding their correct meanings in the text. However, none of the existing works provide a unified solution capable of processing acronyms in various domains and to be publicly available. Thus, we provide the first web-based acronym identification and disambiguation system which can process acronyms from various domains including scientific, biomedical, and general domains. The web-based system is publicly available at http://iq.cs.uoregon.edu:5000 and a demo video is available at https://youtu.be/IkSh7LqI42M. The system source code is also available at https://github.com/amirveyseh/MadDog.