Mainstream computational lexical semantics embraces the assumption that word senses can be represented as discrete items of a predefined inventory. In this paper we show this needs not be the case, and propose a unified model that is able to produce contextually appropriate definitions. In our model, Generationary, we employ a novel span-based encoding scheme which we use to fine-tune an English pre-trained Encoder-Decoder system to generate glosses. We show that, even though we drop the need of choosing from a predefined sense inventory, our model can be employed effectively: not only does Generationary outperform previous approaches in the generative task of Definition Modeling in many settings, but it also matches or surpasses the state of the art in discriminative tasks such as Word Sense Disambiguation and Word-in-Context. Finally, we show that Generationary benefits from training on data from multiple inventories, with strong gains on various zero-shot benchmarks, including a novel dataset of definitions for free adjective-noun phrases. The software and reproduction materials are available at http://generationary.org.

Exploiting syntagmatic information is an encouraging research focus to be pursued in an effort to close the gap between knowledge-based and supervised Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) performance. We follow this direction in our next-generation knowledge-based WSD system, SyntagRank, which we make available via a Web interface and a RESTful API. SyntagRank leverages the disambiguated pairs of co-occurring words included in SyntagNet, a lexical-semantic combination resource, to perform state-of-the-art knowledge-based WSD in a multilingual setting. Our service provides both a user-friendly interface, available at http://syntagnet.org/, and a RESTful endpoint to query the system programmatically (accessible at http://api.syntagnet.org/).

Current research in knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) indicates that performances depend heavily on the Lexical Knowledge Base (LKB) employed. This paper introduces SyntagNet, a novel resource consisting of manually disambiguated lexical-semantic combinations. By capturing sense distinctions evoked by syntagmatic relations, SyntagNet enables knowledge-based WSD systems to establish a new state of the art which challenges the hitherto unrivaled performances attained by supervised approaches. To the best of our knowledge, SyntagNet is the first large-scale manually-curated resource of this kind made available to the community (at http://syntagnet.org).