Many organizations have a large number of on-line documents -- such as manuals, technical reports, transcriptions of customer service calls or telephone conferences, and electronic mail -- which contain information of great potential value. In order to utilize the knowledge these data contain, we need to be able to create common glossaries of domain-specific names and terms. While we were working on automatic glossary extraction, we noticed that technical documents contain a lot of abbreviated terms, which carry important knowledge about the domains. We concluded that the correct recognition of abbreviations and their definitions is very important for understanding the documents and for extracting information from them