📚 NLP Acronyms & Abbreviations Glossary

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Era 1 · Symbolic Era 2 · Statistical Era 3 · ML & Structured Era 4 · Deep Learning Era 5 · Transformers Era 6 · Agentic AI
1

Era 1: 1950s–1970s: Symbolic & Rule-Based Era

Acronym Full Form / Definition
AI Artificial Intelligence
ATN Augmented Transition Network
CFG Context-Free Grammar
CYK Cocke-Younger-Kasami
DCG Definite Clause Grammar
ELIZA ELIZA (named after Eliza Doolittle)
IBM International Business Machines
LISP LISt Processing
MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MT Machine Translation
NLP Natural Language Processing
PDP Programmed Data Processor
Prolog PROgramming in LOGic
QA Question Answering
RTN Recursive Transition Network
SHRDLU SHRDLU (blocks world system)
SIR Semantic Information Retrieval
STUDENT STUDENT (algebra word problem solver)
2

Era 2: 1980s–1990s: Statistical Revolution

Acronym Full Form / Definition
BNC British National Corpus
CFG Context-Free Grammar
CL Computational Linguistics
DEC Digital Equipment Corporation
EM Expectation-Maximization
F1 F1 Score (harmonic mean of precision and recall)
HMM Hidden Markov Model
IE Information Extraction
IR Information Retrieval
MT Machine Translation
MUC Message Understanding Conference
NLP Natural Language Processing
POS Part-of-Speech
SMT Statistical Machine Translation
TREC Text REtrieval Conference
WSJ Wall Street Journal
3

Era 3: 2000–2013: Machine Learning & Structured Prediction

Acronym Full Form / Definition
ACL Association for Computational Linguistics
ANLP Applied Natural Language Processing
BIO Begin-Inside-Outside (tagging scheme)
CBOW Continuous Bag-of-Words
CL Computational Linguistics
CRF Conditional Random Field
CoNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
EM Expectation-Maximization
EMNLP Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
F1 F1 Score
HMM Hidden Markov Model
ICML International Conference on Machine Learning
IE Information Extraction
IWPT International Workshop on Parsing Technologies
LAS Labeled Attachment Score
MEMM Maximum Entropy Markov Model
MIRA Margin Infused Relaxed Algorithm
MSTParser Maximum Spanning Tree Parser
MT Machine Translation
MaxEnt Maximum Entropy
MoE Mixture of Experts
NER Named Entity Recognition
NLP Natural Language Processing
NLTK Natural Language Toolkit
NSP Next Sentence Prediction
Naive Bayes Naive Bayes Classifier
PCFG Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar
PCFG-LA PCFG with Latent Annotations
POS Part-of-Speech
QA Question Answering
SMT Statistical Machine Translation
SVM Support Vector Machine
TF-IDF Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency
UAS Unlabeled Attachment Score
WMT Workshop on Machine Translation
4

Era 4: 2014–2017: Deep Learning & Distributed Representations

Acronym Full Form / Definition
BLEU Bilingual Evaluation Understudy
BPE Byte Pair Encoding
CBOW Continuous Bag-of-Words
CL Computational Linguistics
CNN Convolutional Neural Network
CUDA Compute Unified Device Architecture
EMNLP Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
GNMT Google Neural Machine Translation
GPU Graphics Processing Unit
GRU Gated Recurrent Unit
GloVe Global Vectors
ICLR International Conference on Learning Representations
LSTM Long Short-Term Memory
ML Machine Learning
MT Machine Translation
NIPS Neural Information Processing Systems (now NeurIPS)
NLI Natural Language Inference
NLP Natural Language Processing
NMT Neural Machine Translation
NSP Next Sentence Prediction
OOV Out-of-Vocabulary
PCFG Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar
RNN Recurrent Neural Network
ReLU Rectified Linear Unit
SNLI Stanford Natural Language Inference
SQuAD Stanford Question Answering Dataset
SVM Support Vector Machine
Seq2Seq Sequence-to-Sequence
WMT Workshop on Machine Translation
Word2Vec Word to Vector
cuDNN CUDA Deep Neural Network library
5

Era 5: 2018–2022: Pretrained Transformers & Emergent Capabilities

Acronym Full Form / Definition
AI Artificial Intelligence
ALPAC Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee
BERT Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers
BLEU Bilingual Evaluation Understudy
BiDAF Bidirectional Attention Flow
BiLM Bidirectional Language Model
C4 Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus
CL Computational Linguistics
CRF Conditional Random Field
CV Computer Vision
ChatGPT Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer
CoLA Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability
CoT Chain-of-Thought
DCG Discounted Cumulative Gain
DistilBERT Distilled BERT
ELECTRA Efficiently Learning an Encoder that Classifies Token Replacements Accurately
EMNLP Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
F1 F1 Score
GLUE General Language Understanding Evaluation
GPT Generative Pre-trained Transformer
GPU Graphics Processing Unit
GQA Grouped Query Attention
GRU Gated Recurrent Unit
HMM Hidden Markov Model
Hugging Face Hugging Face (company/library)
ICL In-Context Learning
ICLR International Conference on Learning Representations
IE Information Extraction
JMLR Journal of Machine Learning Research
KL Kullback-Leibler (divergence)
LLaMA Large Language Model Meta AI
LSTM Long Short-Term Memory
LoRA Low-Rank Adaptation
METEOR Metric for Evaluation of Translation with Explicit ORdering
ML Machine Learning
MLM Masked Language Modeling
MNLI Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference
MRR Mean Reciprocal Rank
MSTParser Maximum Spanning Tree Parser
MT Machine Translation
MoE Mixture of Experts
NAACL North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
NER Named Entity Recognition
NLI Natural Language Inference
NLP Natural Language Processing
NLU Natural Language Understanding
NMT Neural Machine Translation
NSP Next Sentence Prediction
NeurIPS Neural Information Processing Systems
OpenAI OpenAI (research organization)
PPO Proximal Policy Optimization
QA Question Answering
QANet Question Answering Network
RACE Reading Comprehension from Examinations
RBRM Rule-Based Reward Model
RL Reinforcement Learning
RLHF Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
RNN Recurrent Neural Network
RoBERTa Robustly Optimized BERT Approach
SFT Supervised Fine-Tuning
SNLI Stanford Natural Language Inference
SQuAD Stanford Question Answering Dataset
SST-2 Stanford Sentiment Treebank (binary)
STS-B Semantic Textual Similarity Benchmark
SVM Support Vector Machine
SWAG Situations With Adversarial Generations
SuperGLUE Super General Language Understanding Evaluation
T5 Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer
TACL Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
TPU Tensor Processing Unit
WMT Workshop on Machine Translation
6

Era 6: 2023–Present: Agentic AI, Reasoning & Multimodal Systems

Acronym Full Form / Definition
AI Artificial Intelligence
API Application Programming Interface
BERT Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers
BLEU Bilingual Evaluation Understudy
BiLM Bidirectional Language Model
CLIP Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training
CPU Central Processing Unit
CVPR Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
ChatGPT Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer
CoT Chain-of-Thought
DCG Discounted Cumulative Gain
Devin Devin (Cognition AI software engineer)
DoRA Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation
ELMo Embeddings from Language Models
EM Expectation-Maximization
F1 F1 Score
GPT Generative Pre-trained Transformer
GPT-4 Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4
GPT-4o GPT-4 Omni (multimodal)
GPU Graphics Processing Unit
GQA Grouped Query Attention
GSM8K Grade School Math 8K
GorillaBench Gorilla Benchmark (API tool use)
H100 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU
HTML HyperText Markup Language
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol
HTTPS Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure
ICL In-Context Learning
IE Information Extraction
IR Information Retrieval
JSON JavaScript Object Notation
LLM Large Language Model
LLaMA Large Language Model Meta AI
LoRA Low-Rank Adaptation
MATH MATH Dataset (competition mathematics)
ML Machine Learning
MLM Masked Language Modeling
MMMU Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding
MSTParser Maximum Spanning Tree Parser
MT Machine Translation
MoE Mixture of Experts
NLP Natural Language Processing
NLU Natural Language Understanding
NMT Neural Machine Translation
NSP Next Sentence Prediction
OpenAI OpenAI (research organization)
PPO Proximal Policy Optimization
QA Question Answering
QLoRA Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation
RAG Retrieval-Augmented Generation
RL Reinforcement Learning
RLAIF Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback
RLHF Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
RM Reward Model
SFT Supervised Fine-Tuning
SMoE Sparse Mixture of Experts
SQL Structured Query Language
SWE-bench Software Engineering Benchmark
TPU Tensor Processing Unit
TensorRT-LLM TensorRT for Large Language Models
URL Uniform Resource Locator
ViT Vision Transformer
WWW World Wide Web
WebArena Web Arena Benchmark
vLLM Virtual Large Language Model (inference engine)