Cross-lingual alignment of biomedical acronyms and their expansions.

We propose a method that aligns biomedical acronyms and their definitions across different languages. The approach is based upon a freely available tool for the extraction of abbreviations together with their expansions, and the subsequent normalization of language-specific variants, synonyms, and translations of the extracted acronym definitions. In this step, acronym expansions are mapped onto a language-independent concept-layer on which intra- as well as interlingual comparisons are drawn.