Abbreviation Disambiguation: A Review of Modern Techniques to Improve Machine Reading Comprehension

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) is an essential task to aid automation in text driven work. Devices such as smart home appliances like the Amazon Echo Dot, Google Home, or smart assistants like Apple Siri or Microsoft Cortana utilize MRC to understand semantic meaning of human speech-to-text to assists their users. The area of MRC can be expanded deeper with the inclusion of understanding and recognizing abbreviations and acronyms in speech or text data. One of the major issues regarding this area includes the boundless different abbreviations and definitions a language can create due to the loose rules for generating them. In this review paper, we explore the different approaches and techniques in modern research that tackles the problem of ambiguous abbreviations and their definitions.