Abbreviations: Improving Operator Performance on Battlefield Automated Systems

One way to improve performance on abbreviations is to inform operators of the rules used to generate the abbreviations. This was tested in a series of rating, encoding and decoding experiments which compared the benefits of truncation versus contraction and fixed versus variable length abbreviations. In addition, the advisability of representing common suffixes ING, ED, S in abbreviations was tested along with a system for dealing with the problem of a simple rule generating the same abbreviations for more than one word. Based upon the results of these experiments, guidelines for generating abbreviations ae presented.