1. A system for matching one or more abbreviations and one or more definitions, comprising: a recognition process that examines character strings and determines which character strings to be abbreviated; an abbreviation pattern generation process that creates from said determined character strings one or more abbreviation patterns representing candidate abbreviations, each of the one or more abbreviation patterns being a template that indicates a number and a location of characters and numeric strings within a candidate abbreviation; and a definition pattern generation process that creates from said determined character strings one or more definition patterns representing candidate definitions, each of the one or more definition patterns being a template that indicates a number and a location of numeric strings, stopwords, prefix/headword combinations and base words within a candidate definition.