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.
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. 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.