Automatically Generated Definitions and their utility for Modeling Word Meaning

Abstract

Modeling lexical semantics is a challenging task, often suffering from interpretability pitfalls. In this paper, we delve into the generation of dictionary-like sense definitions and explore their utility for modeling word meaning. We fine-tuned two Llama models and include an existing T5-based model in our evaluation. Firstly, we evaluate the quality of the generated definitions on existing English benchmarks, setting new state-of-the-art results for the Definition Generation task. Next, we explore the use of definitions generated by our models as intermediate representations subsequently encoded as sentence embeddings. We evaluate this approach on lexical semantics tasks such as the Word-in-Context, Word Sense Induction, and Lexical Semantic Change, setting new state-of-the-art results in all three tasks when compared to unsupervised baselines.