Ad hoc abbreviations are commonly found in informal communication channels that favor shorter messages. We consider the task of reversing these abbreviations in context to recover normalized, expanded versions of abbreviated messages. The problem is
related to, but distinct from, spelling correction, as ad hoc abbreviations are intentional and can involve more substantial differences from the original words. Ad hoc abbreviations are also productively generated on-the-fly, so they cannot be resolved solely by dictionary lookup. We generate a large, open-source data set of ad hoc abbreviations. This data is used to study abbreviation strategies and to develop two strong baselines for abbreviation expansion.
