AARDVARK

Background:

As knowledge at the frontiers of research exponentially increases and becomes more diverse, the problem of identification and recall becomes more accute. Thus, it is more important to accurately, concisely and memorabley label units of knowledge to allow the human researchers to cope. This is called "chunking" in the literature (Miller 1956).

In contrast to the huge effort put into to the automatic retrieval of information in computer based systems, there has been very little research into tools to aid the human retrieval of information. As a result most of the techniques are fairly ad hoc. One of these techniques is the invention of memorable acronyms.

The problem with this is that the invention of good acronyms is very difficult, not to mention time-consuming. It is estimated that the time spent inventing acronyms in the CPM alone, may well exceed two scott-person-hours a week.

The AARDVARK Project:

At AARDVARK we have pioneered the use of acronym space specifications (ASS) as an underlying represention. Each ASS is the space of all possible grammatically correct phrases with a given acronym. This is encoded as tha acronym associated with the corresponding set of possible grammar trees plus a dictionary of suitable word substitutions.

The AARDVARK project aims to produce a series of AI tools to aid the production of suitable acronyms. These will be:

• An abstract specification language, for the unamibuous description of ASSs, called simply `A'.
• A tool for the production of grammatically correct phrases consistent with a given acronym, called the AARDVARK Expander in order for understanding (referred to by the second level acronym AEIOU).
• A tool for getting a gramatical acronym when given advice (GAGAGA, or alternatively GA³).

All of these will be integrated into a single suite called ADE (ADE development environment).

Application Areas (AA):

The tool will be applied in the following areas:

1. In the development of effective strategies for use in grant applications.
2. For the pleasant wiling away of time inventing acronyms, with out anybody being able to say we are not getting on with our research.
3. To locate and trade-mark some of the best acronyms for our commercial partners.
4. For the effective pigeon-holing and general denegration of competing projects (GOFER - good old fashioned effort in research).