2. A system, as in claim 1 , further comprising: a set of abbreviation rules that correlate abbreviation patterns to definition patterns using one or more formation rules that define how each character in an abbreviation is formed from a definition, the set of abbreviation rules including abbreviation rules that have been automatically generated based on candidate abbreviations and definition patterns that have previously been determined as matches by the system; a lookup process that selects one or more formation rules, being selected formation rules, corresponding to the abbreviation pattern of the candidate abbreviation and the definition pattern of the candidate definition; and a rule application process that applies the selected formation rules to determine which candidate definitions match the candidate abbreviation.
3. A system, as in claim 2 , further comprising: one or more matching algorithms that match one or more pairs of abbreviations and definitions based on the abbreviation patterns and the definition patterns.