Findings on Ad Hoc Contractions

Abstract

Abbreviations are often overlooked, since their frequency and acceptance are almost second nature in everyday communication. Business names, handwritten notes, online messaging, professional domains, and different languages all have their own set of abbreviations. The abundance and frequent introduction of new abbreviations cause multiple areas of overlaps and ambiguity, which mean documents often lose their clarity. We reverse engineered the process of creating these ad hoc abbreviations and revealed some preliminary statistics on what makes them easier or harder to define. In addition, we generated candidate definitions for which it proved difficult for a word sense disambiguation model to select the correct definition.