Automatic Chinese Abbreviation Generation Using Conditional Random Field

Boulder, Colorado, June 2009. c ©2009 Association for Computational Linguistics Automatic Chinese Abbreviation Generation Using Conditional Random Field Dong Yang, Yi-cheng Pan, and Sadaoki Furui Department of Computer Science Tokyo Institute of Technology Tokyo 152-8552 Japan {raymond,thomas,furui}@furui.cs.titech.ac.jp Abstract This paper presents a new method for automatically generating abbreviations for Chinese organization names. Abbreviations are commonly used in spoken Chinese, especially for organization names. The generation of Chinese abbreviation is much more complex than English abbreviations, most of which are acronyms and truncations. The abbreviation generation process is formulated as a character tagging problem and the conditional random field (CRF) is used as the tagging model. A carefully selected group of features is used in the CRF model. After generating a list of abbreviation candidates using the CRF, a length model is incorporated to re-rank the candidates. Finally the full-name and abbreviation co-occurrence information from a web search engine is utilized to further improve the performance. We achieved top-10 coverage of 88.3% by the proposed method.