%0 Conference Proceedings %T A Unified Model for Reverse Dictionary and Definition Modelling %A Chen, Pinzhen %A Zhao, Zheng %Y He, Yulan %Y Ji, Heng %Y Li, Sujian %Y Liu, Yang %Y Chang, Chua-Hui %S Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers) %D 2022 %8 November %I Association for Computational Linguistics %C Online only %F chen-zhao-2022-unified %X We build a dual-way neural dictionary to retrieve words given definitions, and produce definitions for queried words. The model learns the two tasks simultaneously and handles unknown words via embeddings. It casts a word or a definition to the same representation space through a shared layer, then generates the other form in a multi-task fashion. Our method achieves promising automatic scores on previous benchmarks without extra resources. Human annotators prefer the model’s outputs in both reference-less and reference-based evaluation, indicating its practicality. Analysis suggests that multiple objectives benefit learning. %U https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.2 %P 8-13