Motivations

So long as there has been a problem, there has been an underlying motivation to solve that problem. In this case, the motivation is primarily to extract useful information by expanding colloquialisms, and to generate easily understandable, pithy expressions by contracting formal jargons. Apropos of Chemistry, our quest boils down to a search for important chemical terms and expressions hidden in the folds of colloquialisms.

So we can see that besides language processing methods and models, we need to be thoroughly involved with IR techniques as well. Language processing will enable us to generate some useful expressions from some other ones. IR will help us to identify the "usefulness" contained in those expressions.

Personal motivations include my passion for learning languages and their intricacies. I am much drawn to multilingual and cross-lingual issues as well. All these factors drove me to choose this particular problem.