Friday, April 25, 2014

AURA - AUtomatic Research Acronymizer

A discovery, project, tool or model is measured by the coolness of its acronym. There are BRAIN, and MUSIC, STEM and ICARUS and the list goes on and on (check this out). But finding the right acronym is not that easy. A short personal story: I once worked on a quantum mechanical problem called Entanglement Sudden Death, ESD. It's a macabre name for a really cool phenomenon. However, I showed that entanglement, even after its sudden death, can be brought back to life. So I really wanted a cool acronym for it and I found the acronym ESD-CPR (which usually stands for Cardio-Respiratory Resuscitation). So I had my acronym, but I had to find what it stood for. After hours of agony I came up with Controlled Partial Resuscitation, which is actually a good description of the phenomenon.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was an automatic tool that, given the short description of the research, gives you a cool, relevant acronym? AURA - AUtomatic Research Acronymizer. The problem is obviously, NLP (Natural Language Processing), which requires to "read" the research description, "analyze" what is written and "come up" with the correct acronym. However, related tools are already out there, such as the HAHAcronym


I believe that combining tools such as the tool cited above (a database of known acronyms and an algorithm for generating acronyms), as well as semantic networks such as concept net, that will accommodate the network of scientific jargon, can facilitate this very important, highly influential and greatly required tool.

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