Abstract
Definition Modeling, the task of generating definitions, was first proposed as a means to evaluate the semantic quality of word embeddings—a coherent lexical semantic representations of a word in context should contain all the information necessary to generate its definition. The relative novelty of this task entails that we do not know which factors are actually relied upon by a Definition Modeling system. In this paper, we present evidence that the task may not involve as much semantics as one might expect: we show how an earlier model from the literature is both rather insensitive to semantic aspects such as explicit polysemy, as well as reliant on formal similarities between headwords and words occurring in its glosses, casting doubt on the validity of the task as a means to evaluate embeddings.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.iwcs-1.27
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computational Semantics
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Nancy, France
- Editors:
- Maxime Amblard, Ellen Breitholtz
- Venue:
- IWCS
- SIG:
- SIGSEM
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 258–266
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.iwcs-1.27
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Vincent Segonne and Timothee Mickus. 2023. Definition Modeling : To model definitions. Generating Definitions With Little to No Semantics. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computational Semantics, pages 258–266, Nancy, France. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Definition Modeling : To model definitions. Generating Definitions With Little to No Semantics (Segonne & Mickus, IWCS 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/revert-3132-ingestion-checklist/2023.iwcs-1.27.pdf