GPT Perdetry Test: Generating new meanings for new words
Nikolay Malkin, Sameera Lanka, Pranav Goel, Sudha Rao, Nebojsa Jojic
Abstract
Human innovation in language, such as inventing new words, is a challenge for pretrained language models. We assess the ability of one large model, GPT-3, to process new words and decide on their meaning. We create a set of nonce words and prompt GPT-3 to generate their dictionary definitions. We find GPT-3 produces plausible definitions that align with human judgments. Moreover, GPT-3’s definitions are sometimes preferred to those invented by humans, signaling its intriguing ability not just to adapt, but to add to the evolving vocabulary of the English language.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.naacl-main.439
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5542–5553
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.439
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.439
- Cite (ACL):
- Nikolay Malkin, Sameera Lanka, Pranav Goel, Sudha Rao, and Nebojsa Jojic. 2021. GPT Perdetry Test: Generating new meanings for new words. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 5542–5553, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- GPT Perdetry Test: Generating new meanings for new words (Malkin et al., NAACL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp22-frontmatter/2021.naacl-main.439.pdf