METHOD, SYSTEM, AND APPARTUS FOR SELECTING AN ACRONYM EXPANSION

• US 20130110500A1
• Filed: 04/29/2010
• Published: 05/02/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 04/29/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP (Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Company)
• Original Assignee: Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. (HP Inc.)
• Inventors: Feng, Shicong, Xiong, Yuhong, Liu, Wei, Yao, Conglei
• Granted Patent: US 9,213,690 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/9
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/16 Automatic learning of transformation rules, e.g. from examples
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/284 Lexical analysis, e.g. tokenisation or collocates
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/40 Processing or translation of natural language natural language analysis G06F40/20; semantic analysis G06F40/30

Abstract

According to one embodiment of the present invention, there is provided a method of selecting an expansion for an acronym in a document of a set of linked documents. The method comprises obtaining for each occurrence of the acronym in the set of linked documents one or more possible acronym expansions and an associated probability that the one or more possible acronym expansions is the correct acronym expansion. The further comprises identifying a sub-set of documents from the set of linked documents in which the acronym occurs. The method further comprises recalculating the associated probabilities for a first occurrence of an acronym in the sub-set of documents based, in part, on the associated probabilities of other occurrences of the acronym in the sub-set of documents and the distance between the first occurrence and the other occurrences.

Claims

1. A method of selecting an expansion for an acronym in a document of a set of linked documents, the method comprising:

obtaining for each occurrence of the acronym in the set of linked documents one or more possible acronym expansions and an associated probability that the one or more possible acronym expansions is the correct acronym expansion;

identifying a sub-set of documents from the set of linked documents in which the acronym occurs; and

recalculating the associated probabilities for a first occurrence of an acronym in the sub-set of documents based, in part, on the associated probabilities of other occurrences of the acronym in the sub-set of documents and the distance between the first occurrence and the other occurrences.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising, recalculating the associated probabilities for the other occurrences of the acronym using any previously recalculated associated probabilities.

3. The method of claim 2, further comprising iteratively recalculating a predetermined number of times the associated probabilities for all of the occurrences of the acronym, each time using the previously recalculated associated probabilities.

4. The method of claim 1, further comprising, selecting the acronym expansion having the highest recalculated probability as the correct acronym expansion.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the distance is the minimum number of links required to navigate from a document comprising the first occurrence and a document comprising a different occurrence of the same acronym.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein each document is a web page, and wherein the set of documents is a web site.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of recalculating the associated probabilities for the first occurrence of the acronym further comprises performing the equation:

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of obtaining comprises obtaining the probabilities using a content-based analysis technique.

9. The method of claim 4, further comprising modifying the document in which the first occurrence of acronym occurs to include the selected acronym expansion.

11. A carrier carrying computer-implementable instructions that, when interpreted by a computer, cause the computer to perform a method in accordance with any of method claims 1 to 9.

10. A computing device, comprising:

a processor,

a memory in communication with the processor, and

computer executable instructions stored in the memory and executable on the processor to determine an acronym expansion of an acronym in a web page of a web site by;

obtaining, through a content-based analysis, for each occurrence of the acronym in the web site, one or more possible acronym expansions and an associated probability that the one or more acronym expansions is the correct acronym expansion;

identifying a set of web pages from the web site in which the acronym occurs; and

calculating a new set of probabilities for a first occurrence of the acronym in the identified set of web pages, the calculation being made in part based on the associated probabilities of other occurrences of the acronym in other ones of the set of web pages and the number of links linking the other ones of the set of web pages.