Generative Dictionary: Improving Language Learner Understanding with Contextual Definitions

Kai-Wen Tuan, Hai-Lun Tu, Jason S. Chang


Abstract
We introduce GenerativeDictionary, a novel dictionary system that generates word sense interpretations based on the given context. Our approach involves transforming context sentences to highlight the meaning of target words within their specific context. The method involves automatically transforming context sentences into sequences of low-dimensional vector token representations, automatically processing the input embeddings through multiple layers of transformers, and automatically generate the word senses based on the latent representations derived from the context. At runtime, context sentences with target words are processed through a transformer model that outputs the relevant word senses.Blind evaluations on a combined set of dictionary example sentences and generated sentences based on given word senses demonstrate that our method is comparable to traditional word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods. By framing WSD as a generative problem, GenerativeDictionary delivers more precise and contextually appropriate word senses, enhancing the effectiveness of language learning tools.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-demo.41
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Delia Irazu Hernandez Farias, Tom Hope, Manling Li
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
390–396
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-demo.41
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kai-Wen Tuan, Hai-Lun Tu, and Jason S. Chang. 2024. Generative Dictionary: Improving Language Learner Understanding with Contextual Definitions. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 390–396, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generative Dictionary: Improving Language Learner Understanding with Contextual Definitions (Tuan et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-demo.41.pdf