Learning to Describe Unknown Phrases with Local and Global Contexts

Shonosuke Ishiwatari, Hiroaki Hayashi, Naoki Yoshinaga, Graham Neubig, Shoetsu Sato, Masashi Toyoda, Masaru Kitsuregawa


Abstract
When reading a text, it is common to become stuck on unfamiliar words and phrases, such as polysemous words with novel senses, rarely used idioms, internet slang, or emerging entities. If we humans cannot figure out the meaning of those expressions from the immediate local context, we consult dictionaries for definitions or search documents or the web to find other global context to help in interpretation. Can machines help us do this work? Which type of context is more important for machines to solve the problem? To answer these questions, we undertake a task of describing a given phrase in natural language based on its local and global contexts. To solve this task, we propose a neural description model that consists of two context encoders and a description decoder. In contrast to the existing methods for non-standard English explanation [Ni+ 2017] and definition generation [Noraset+ 2017; Gadetsky+ 2018], our model appropriately takes important clues from both local and global contexts. Experimental results on three existing datasets (including WordNet, Oxford and Urban Dictionaries) and a dataset newly created from Wikipedia demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over previous work.
Anthology ID:
N19-1350
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3467–3476
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1350
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1350
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shonosuke Ishiwatari, Hiroaki Hayashi, Naoki Yoshinaga, Graham Neubig, Shoetsu Sato, Masashi Toyoda, and Masaru Kitsuregawa. 2019. Learning to Describe Unknown Phrases with Local and Global Contexts. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 3467–3476, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Describe Unknown Phrases with Local and Global Contexts (Ishiwatari et al., NAACL 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1350.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/N19-1350.mp4