The definition generation task can help language learners by providing explanations for unfamiliar words. This task has attracted much attention in recent years. We propose a novel task of Simple Definition Generation (SDG) to help language learners and low literacy readers. A significant challenge of this task is the lack of learner’s dictionaries in many languages, and therefore the lack of data for supervised training. We explore this task and propose a multitasking framework SimpDefiner that only requires a standard dictionary with complex definitions and a corpus containing arbitrary simple texts. We disentangle the complexity factors from the text by carefully designing a parameter sharing scheme between two decoders. By jointly training these components, the framework can generate both complex and simple definitions simultaneously. We demonstrate that the framework can generate relevant, simple definitions for the target words through automatic and manual evaluations on English and Chinese datasets. Our method outperforms the baseline model by a 1.77 SARI score on the English dataset, and raises the proportion of the low level (HSK level 1-3) words in Chinese definitions by 3.87%.

This paper describes the BLCU-ICALL system used in the SemEval-2022 Task 1 Comparing Dictionaries and Word Embeddings, the Definition Modeling subtrack, achieving 1st on Italian, 2nd on Spanish and Russian, and 3rd on English and French. We propose a transformer-based multitasking framework to explore the task. The framework integrates multiple embedding architectures through the cross-attention mechanism, and captures the structure of glosses through a masking language model objective. Additionally, we also investigate a simple but effective model ensembling strategy to further improve the robustness. The evaluation results show the effectiveness of our solution. We release our code at: https://github.com/blcuicall/SemEval2022-Task1-DM.

释义生成任务是指为一个目标词生成相应的释义。前人研究中文释义生成任务时未考虑目标词的上下文,本文首次在中文释义生成任务中使用了目标词的上下文信息,并提出了一个基于BERT与柱搜索的释义生成模型。本文构建了包含上下文的CWN中文数据集用于开展实验,除了BLEU指标之外,还使用语义相似度作为额外的自动评价指标,实验结果显示本文模型在中文CWN数据集和英文Oxford数据集上均有显著提升,人工评价结果也与自动评价结果一致。最后,本文对生成实例进行了深入分析。

Multi-choice question answering in exams is a typical QA task. To accomplish this task, we present an answer localization method to locate answers shown in web pages, considering structural information and semantic information both. Using this method as basis, we analyze sentences and paragraphs appeared on web pages to get predictions. With this answer localization system, we get effective results on both validation dataset and test dataset.