Definition modeling includes acquiring word embeddings from dictionary definitions and generating definitions of words. While the meanings of defining words are important in dictionary definitions, it is crucial to capture the lexical semantic relations between defined words and defining words. However, thus far, the utilization of such relations has not been explored for definition modeling. In this paper, we propose definition modeling methods that use lexical semantic relations. To utilize implicit semantic relations in definitions, we use unsupervisedly obtained pattern-based word-pair embeddings that represent semantic relations of word pairs. Experimental results indicate that our methods improve the performance in learning embeddings from definitions, as well as definition generation.

Recognizing lexical semantic relations between word pairs is an important task for many applications of natural language processing. One of the mainstream approaches to this task is to exploit the lexico-syntactic paths connecting two target words, which reflect the semantic relations of word pairs. However, this method requires that the considered words co-occur in a sentence. This requirement is hardly satisfied because of Zipf’s law, which states that most content words occur very rarely. In this paper, we propose novel methods with a neural model of P(path|w1,w2) to solve this problem. Our proposed model of P (path|w1, w2 ) can be learned in an unsupervised manner and can generalize the co-occurrences of word pairs and dependency paths. This model can be used to augment the path data of word pairs that do not co-occur in the corpus, and extract features capturing relational information from word pairs. Our experimental results demonstrate that our methods improve on previous neural approaches based on dependency paths and successfully solve the focused problem.

Capturing the semantic relations of words in a vector space contributes to many natural language processing tasks. One promising approach exploits lexico-syntactic patterns as features of word pairs. In this paper, we propose a novel model of this pattern-based approach, neural latent relational analysis (NLRA). NLRA can generalize co-occurrences of word pairs and lexico-syntactic patterns, and obtain embeddings of the word pairs that do not co-occur. This overcomes the critical data sparseness problem encountered in previous pattern-based models. Our experimental results on measuring relational similarity demonstrate that NLRA outperforms the previous pattern-based models. In addition, when combined with a vector offset model, NLRA achieves a performance comparable to that of the state-of-the-art model that exploits additional semantic relational data.