A General Approach to Extracting Full Names and Abbreviations for Chinese Entities from the Web

Identifying Full names/abbreviations for entities is a challenging problem in many applications, e.g. question answering and information retrieval. In this paper, we propose a general extraction method of extracting full names/abbreviations from Chinese Web corpora. For a given entity, we construct forward and backward query items and commit them to a search engine (e.g. Google), and utilize search results to extract full names and abbreviations for the entity. To verify the results, filtering and marking methods are used to sort all the results. Experiments show that our method achieves precision of 84.7% for abbreviations, and 77.0% for full names.