What is Allie?
Allie is a search service for abbreviations and long forms utilized in Lifesciences.
It provides a solution to the issue that many abbreviations are used in the literature,
and polysemous or synonymous abbreviations appear frequently,
making it difficult to read and understand scientific papers that are not relevant to the reader's expertise.
Allie searches for abbreviations and their corresponding long forms from titles and abstracts in the entire MEDLINE®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
MEDLINE stores over 20 million bibliographic information in life science and is suitable for extracting domain specific abbreviations and their long forms appearing in actual literature.
What Can Users Do Using Allie?
- Users can search for the long forms of abbreviations or the abbreviations of long forms.
- Bibliographic data which includes the inquired abbreviation or long form in titles or abstracts can be obtained.
- Users can also obtain co-occurring abbreviations in titles and abstracts.
- REST/SOAP interfaces are available which allow the users to call upon Allie from their scripts, programs, etc.
Video Tutorial
You can learn Allie here (video tutorial).
Related Publication
Please refer the following publication:
Y. Yamamoto, A. Yamaguchi, H. Bono and T. Takagi, "Allie: a database and a search service of abbreviations and long forms.", Database, 2011:bar03.
PubMed Entry | Full text paper available
Allie uses ALICE to extract abbreviation and long form pairs along with PubMed ID from MEDLINE data.
The details of this tool is described in the following publication:
H. Ao and T. Takagi, "ALICE: an algorithm to extract abbreviations from MEDLINE.", J Am Med Inform Assoc., 2005 Sep-Oct;12(5):576-86.
PubMed Entry | Full text paper available
Update
Last Index Update: 2012 Jan 16 (Monthly update)
Download
You can download and use the database used for Allie (Weekly update) under the terms and conditions of use.
[download site]
A Search Service for Abbreviation / Long Form