A Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Large-scale Chinese Abbreviation Database Construction

Abbreviations often used in our daily communication play an important role in natural language processing. Most of the existing studies regard the Chinese abbreviation prediction as a sequence labeling problem. However, sequence labeling models usually ignore label dependencies in the process of abbreviation prediction, and the label prediction of each character should be conditioned on its previous labels. In this paper, we propose to formalize the Chinese abbreviation prediction task as a sequence generation problem, and a novel sequence-to-sequence model is designed. To boost the performance of our deep model, we further propose a multi-level pre-trained model that incorporates character, word, and concept-level embeddings. To evaluate our methods, a new dataset for Chinese abbreviation prediction is automatically built, which contains 81,351 pairs of full forms and abbreviations. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on a public dataset and the built dataset, and the experimental results on both datasets show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. More importantly, we build a large-scale database for a specific domain, i.e., life services in Meituan Inc., with high accuracy of about 82.7%, which contains 4,134,142 pairs of full forms and abbreviations. The online A/B testing on Meituan APP and Dianping APP suggests that Click-Through Rate increases by 0.59% and 0.86% respectively when the built database is used in the searching system. We have released our API on http://kw.fudan.edu.cn/ddemos/abbr/ with over 87k API calls in 9 months.