Using low dimensional vector space to represent words has been very effective in many NLP tasks. However, it doesn't work well when faced with the problem of rare and unseen words. In this paper, we propose to leverage the knowledge in semantic dictionary in combination with some morphological information to build an enhanced vector space. We get an improvement of 2.3% over the state-of-the-art Heidel Time system in temporal expression recognition, and obtain a large gain in other name entity recognition (NER) tasks. The semantic dictionary Hownet alone also shows promising results in computing lexical similarity.
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡哈拉格普尔分校）
Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) has become an important problem to solve in the recent years due to the growth of content in multiple languages in the Web. One of the standard methods is to use query translation from source to target language. In this paper, we propose an approach based on word embeddings, a method that captures contextual clues for a particular word in the source language and gives those words as translations that occur in a similar context in the target language. Once we obtain the word embeddings of the source and target language pairs, we learn a projection fro…
Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), where queries and documents are in different languages, has of late become one of the major topics within the information retrieval community. This paper proposes a Japanese/English CLIR system, where we combine a query translation and retrieval modules. We currently target the retrieval of technical documents, and therefore the performance of our system is highly dependent on the quality of the translation of technical terms. However, the technical term translation is still problematic in that technical terms are often compound words, and thus new …
Department of Surgery & Cancer, Imperial College London, United Kingdom（伦敦帝国学院外科与癌症系）；Weizenbaum Institute Berlin, Germany（柏林Weizenbaum研究所）；Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Free University of Berlin, Germany（柏林自由大学媒体与传播研究所）；Institute for Research on Far Right Extremism, University of Tübingen, Germany（图宾根大学右翼极端主义研究所）
Understanding the semantic relationships between terms is a fundamental task in natural language processing applications. While structured resources that can express those relationships in a formal way, such as ontologies, are still scarce, a large number of linguistic resources gathering dictionary definitions is becoming available, but understanding the semantic structure of natural language definitions is fundamental to make them useful in semantic interpretation tasks. Based on an analysis of a subset of WordNet's glosses, we propose a set of semantic roles that compose the semantic struct…
The project presented in this article aims to formalize criteria and procedures in order to extract semantic information from parsed dictionary glosses. The actual purpose of the project is the generation of a semantic network (nearly an ontology) issued from a monolingual Italian dictionary, through unsupervised procedures. Since the project involves rule-based Parsing, Semantic Tagging and Word Sense Disambiguation techniques, its outcomes may find an interest also beyond this immediate intent. The cooperation of both syntactic and semantic features in meaning construction are investigated, …
In recent years, Deep Learning (DL) models are becoming important due to their demonstrated success at overcoming complex learning problems. DL models have been applied effectively for different Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as part-of-Speech (PoS) tagging and Machine Translation (MT). Disease Named Entity Recognition (Disease-NER) is a crucial task which aims at extracting disease Named Entities (NEs) from text. In this paper, a DL model for Disease-NER using dictionary information is proposed and evaluated on National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) disease corpus …
Translation ambiguity, out of vocabulary words and missing some translations in bilingual dictionaries make dictionary-based Cross-language Information Retrieval (CLIR) a challenging task. Moreover, in agglutinative languages which do not have reliable stemmers, missing various lexical formations in bilingual dictionaries degrades CLIR performance. This paper aims to introduce a probabilistic translation model to solve the ambiguity problem, and also to provide most likely formations of a dictionary candidate. We propose Minimum Edit Support Candidates (MESC) method that exploits a monolingual…
Beijing Language and Culture University（北京语言大学）；Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（上海财经大学）
Dictionaries can help language learners to learn vocabulary by providing definitions of words. Since traditional dictionaries present word senses as discrete items in predefined inventories, they fall short of flexibility, which is required in providing specific meanings of words in particular contexts. In this paper, we introduce the LitMind Dictionary (https://dictionary.litmind.ink), an open-source online generative dictionary that takes a word and context containing the word as input and automatically generates a definition as output. Incorporating state-of-the-art definition generation mo…
A large class of unsupervised algorithms for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is that of dictionary-based methods. Various algorithms have as the root Lesk's algorithm, which exploits the sense definitions in the dictionary directly. Our approach uses the lexical base WordNet for a new algorithm originated in Lesk's, namely "chain algorithm for disambiguation of all words", CHAD. We show how translation from a language into another one and also text entailment verification could be accomplished by this disambiguation.
Sentiment in social media is increasingly considered as an important resource for customer segmentation, market understanding, and tackling other socio-economic issues. However, sentiment in social media is difficult to measure since user-generated content is usually short and informal. Although many traditional sentiment analysis methods have been proposed, identifying slang sentiment words remains untackled. One of the reasons is that slang sentiment words are not available in existing dictionaries or sentiment lexicons. To this end, we propose to build the first sentiment dictionary of slan…
Reverse dictionary is the task to find the proper target word given the word description. In this paper, we tried to incorporate BERT into this task. However, since BERT is based on the byte-pair-encoding (BPE) subword encoding, it is nontrivial to make BERT generate a word given the description. We propose a simple but effective method to make BERT generate the target word for this specific task. Besides, the cross-lingual reverse dictionary is the task to find the proper target word described in another language. Previous models have to keep two different word embeddings and learn to align t…
Tokyo Metropolitan University（东京都立大学）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Amazon（亚马逊）
Word embeddings trained on large corpora have shown to encode high levels of unfair discriminatory gender, racial, religious and ethnic biases. In contrast, human-written dictionaries describe the meanings of words in a concise, objective and an unbiased manner. We propose a method for debiasing pre-trained word embeddings using dictionaries, without requiring access to the original training resources or any knowledge regarding the word embedding algorithms used. Unlike prior work, our proposed method does not require the types of biases to be pre-defined in the form of word lists, and learns …
In this paper, we outline an approach to build graph-based reverse dictionaries using word definitions. A reverse dictionary takes a phrase as an input and outputs a list of words semantically similar to that phrase. It is a solution to the Tip-of-the-Tongue problem. We use a distance-based similarity measure, computed on a graph, to assess the similarity between a word and the input phrase. We compare the performance of our approach with the Onelook Reverse Dictionary and a distributional semantics method based on word2vec, and show that our approach is much better than the distributional sem…
The paper presents a linguistic and computational model aiming at making the morphological structure of the lexicon emerge from the formal and semantic regularities of the words it contains. The model is word-based. The proposed morphological structure consists of (1) binary relations that connect each headword with words that are morphologically related, and especially with the members of its morphological family and its derivational series, and of (2) the analogies that hold between the words. The model has been tested on the lexicon of French using the TLFi machine readable dictionary.
This paper introduces the Grievance Dictionary, a psycholinguistic dictionary which can be used to automatically understand language use in the context of grievance-fuelled violence threat assessment. We describe the development the dictionary, which was informed by suggestions from experienced threat assessment practitioners. These suggestions and subsequent human and computational word list generation resulted in a dictionary of 20,502 words annotated by 2,318 participants. The dictionary was validated by applying it to texts written by violent and non-violent individuals, showing strong evi…
In this paper, we propose a new task of machine translation (MT), which is based on no parallel sentences but can refer to a ground-truth bilingual dictionary. Motivated by the ability of a monolingual speaker learning to translate via looking up the bilingual dictionary, we propose the task to see how much potential an MT system can attain using the bilingual dictionary and large scale monolingual corpora, while is independent on parallel sentences. We propose anchored training (AT) to tackle the task. AT uses the bilingual dictionary to establish anchoring points for closing the gap between …
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校雷德伍德理论神经科学中心）；School of Optometry, UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校视光学院）
Co-occurrence statistics based word embedding techniques have proved to be very useful in extracting the semantic and syntactic representation of words as low dimensional continuous vectors. In this work, we discovered that dictionary learning can open up these word vectors as a linear combination of more elementary word factors. We demonstrate many of the learned factors have surprisingly strong semantic or syntactic meaning corresponding to the factors previously identified manually by human inspection. Thus dictionary learning provides a powerful visualization tool for understanding word em…
Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
An intuitive way for a human to write paraphrase sentences is to replace words or phrases in the original sentence with their corresponding synonyms and make necessary changes to ensure the new sentences are fluent and grammatically correct. We propose a novel approach to modeling the process with dictionary-guided editing networks which effectively conduct rewriting on the source sentence to generate paraphrase sentences. It jointly learns the selection of the appropriate word level and phrase level paraphrase pairs in the context of the original sentence from an off-the-shelf dictionary as w…
This paper proposes a method for measuring semantic similarity between words as a new tool for text analysis. The similarity is measured on a semantic network constructed systematically from a subset of the English dictionary, LDOCE (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). Spreading activation on the network can directly compute the similarity between any two words in the Longman Defining Vocabulary, and indirectly the similarity of all the other words in LDOCE. The similarity represents the strength of lexical cohesion or semantic relation, and also provides valuable information about si…
When using a third language to construct a bilingual dictionary, it is necessary to discriminate equivalencies from inappropriate words derived as a result of ambiguity in the third language. We propose a method to treat this by utilizing the structures of dictionaries to measure the nearness of the meanings of words. The resulting dictionary is a word-to-word bilingual dictionary of nouns and can be used to refine the entries and equivalencies in published bilingual dictionaries.
What is the relation between a word and its description, or a word and its embedding? Both descriptions and embeddings are semantic representations of words. But, what information from the original word remains in these representations? Or more importantly, which information about a word do these two representations share? Definition Modeling and Reverse Dictionary are two opposite learning tasks that address these questions. The goal of the Definition Modeling task is to investigate the power of information laying inside a word embedding to express the meaning of the word in a humanly underst…
Université du Québec à Montréal（魁北克大学蒙特利尔分校）；Université du Québec à Chicoutimi（魁北克大学希库蒂米分校）；Universidade de São Paulo（圣保罗大学）；University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）；Centre de recherches mathématiques, Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学数学研究中心）
How many words are needed to define all the words in a dictionary? Graph-theoretic analysis reveals that about 10% of a dictionary is a unique Kernel of words that define one another and all the rest, but this is not the smallest such subset. The Kernel consists of one huge strongly connected component (SCC), about half its size, the Core, surrounded by many small SCCs, the Satellites. Core words can define one another but not the rest of the dictionary. The Kernel also contains many overlapping Minimal Grounding Sets (MGSs), each about the same size as the Core, each part-Core, part-Satellite…
University of Vermont（佛蒙特大学）；The MITRE Corporation（MITRE公司）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
The emergence and global adoption of social media has rendered possible the real-time estimation of population-scale sentiment, bearing profound implications for our understanding of human behavior. Given the growing assortment of sentiment measuring instruments, comparisons between them are evidently required. Here, we perform detailed tests of 6 dictionary-based methods applied to 4 different corpora, and briefly examine a further 20 methods. We show that a dictionary-based method will only perform both reliably and meaningfully if (1) the dictionary covers a sufficiently large enough portio…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
Sememes, defined as the minimum semantic units of human languages in linguistics, have been proven useful in many NLP tasks. Since manual construction and update of sememe knowledge bases (KBs) are costly, the task of automatic sememe prediction has been proposed to assist sememe annotation. In this paper, we explore the approach of applying dictionary definitions to predicting sememes for unannotated words. We find that sememes of each word are usually semantically matched to different words in its dictionary definition, and we name this matching relationship local semantic correspondence. Ac…
It is often useful to sort words into an order that reflects relations among their meanings as obtained by using a thesaurus. In this paper, we introduce a method of arranging words semantically by using several types of `{\sf is-a}' thesauri and a multi-dimensional thesaurus. We also describe three major applications where a meaning sort is useful and show the effectiveness of a meaning sort. Since there is no doubt that a word list in meaning-order is easier to use than a word list in some random order, a meaning sort, which can easily produce a word list in meaning-order, must be useful and…
CLiPS Research Center, University of Antwerp（安特卫普大学 CLiPS 研究中心）
We present a dictionary-based approach to racism detection in Dutch social media comments, which were retrieved from two public Belgian social media sites likely to attract racist reactions. These comments were labeled as racist or non-racist by multiple annotators. For our approach, three discourse dictionaries were created: first, we created a dictionary by retrieving possibly racist and more neutral terms from the training data, and then augmenting these with more general words to remove some bias. A second dictionary was created through automatic expansion using a \texttt{word2vec} model t…
Most existing methods for automatic bilingual dictionary induction rely on prior alignments between the source and target languages, such as parallel corpora or seed dictionaries. For many language pairs, such supervised alignments are not readily available. We propose an unsupervised approach for learning a bilingual dictionary for a pair of languages given their independently-learned monolingual word embeddings. The proposed method exploits local and global structures in monolingual vector spaces to align them such that similar words are mapped to each other. We show empirically that the per…
We solve difficult word-based substitution codes by constructing a decoding lattice and searching that lattice with a neural language model. We apply our method to a set of enciphered letters exchanged between US Army General James Wilkinson and agents of the Spanish Crown in the late 1700s and early 1800s, obtained from the US Library of Congress. We are able to decipher 75.1% of the cipher-word tokens correctly.
Social media user-generated text is actually the main resource for many NLP tasks. This text however, does not follow the standard rules of writing. Moreover, the use of dialect such as Moroccan Arabic in written communications increases further NLP tasks complexity. A dialect is a verbal language that does not have a standard orthography, which leads users to improvise spelling while writing. Thus, for the same word we can find multiple forms of transliterations. Subsequently, it is mandatory to normalize these different transliterations to one canonical word form. To reach this goal, we have…
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington（华盛顿大学保罗·G·艾伦计算机科学与工程学院）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）
Current models for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) struggle to disambiguate rare senses, despite reaching human performance on global WSD metrics. This stems from a lack of data for both modeling and evaluating rare senses in existing WSD datasets. In this paper, we introduce FEWS (Few-shot Examples of Word Senses), a new low-shot WSD dataset automatically extracted from example sentences in Wiktionary. FEWS has high sense coverage across different natural language domains and provides: (1) a large training set that covers many more senses than previous datasets and (2) a comprehensive evaluat…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；University of Colorado（科罗拉多大学）；Google Research Zürich（谷歌苏黎世研究中心）
Cross-lingual word embeddings (CLWE) are often evaluated on bilingual lexicon induction (BLI). Recent CLWE methods use linear projections, which underfit the training dictionary, to generalize on BLI. However, underfitting can hinder generalization to other downstream tasks that rely on words from the training dictionary. We address this limitation by retrofitting CLWE to the training dictionary, which pulls training translation pairs closer in the embedding space and overfits the training dictionary. This simple post-processing step often improves accuracy on two downstream tasks, despite low…
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)（南里奥格兰德联邦大学（UFRGS））；Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar)（圣卡洛斯联邦大学（UFSCar））；Université Paris-Est (UPE)（巴黎东大学（UPE））
We report an experiment to check the identification of a set of words in popular written Portuguese with two versions of a computational dictionary of Brazilian Portuguese, DELAF PB 2004 and DELAF PB 2015. This dictionary is freely available for use in linguistic analyses of Brazilian Portuguese and other researches, which justifies critical study. The vocabulary comes from the PorPopular corpus, made of popular newspapers Di{á}rio Ga{ú}cho (DG) and Massa! (MA). From DG, we retained a set of texts with 984.465 words (tokens), published in 2008, with the spelling used before the Portuguese Lang…
Vowels in Arabic are optional orthographic symbols written as diacritics above or below letters. In Arabic texts, typically more than 97 percent of written words do not explicitly show any of the vowels they contain; that is to say, depending on the author, genre and field, less than 3 percent of words include any explicit vowel. Although numerous studies have been published on the issue of restoring the omitted vowels in speech technologies, little attention has been given to this problem in papers dedicated to written Arabic technologies.f In this research, we present Arabic-Unitex, an Arabi…
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 mult…
WordAlchemy: A transformer-based Reverse Dictionary
Dept. of Computer Engineering and Dept. of Computer Engineering and Information Technology Information Technology College of Engineering, Pune College of Engineering, Pune Maharashtra, India Maharashtra, India（计算机工程系和计算机工程与信息技术系，工程学院，比拉尔，马哈拉施特拉邦，印度）
Chinese word segmentation (CWS) is an important task for Chinese NLP. Recently, many neural network based methods have been proposed for CWS. However, these methods require a large number of labeled sentences for model training, and usually cannot utilize the useful information in Chinese dictionary. In this paper, we propose two methods to exploit the dictionary information for CWS. The first one is based on pseudo labeled data generation, and the second one is based on multi-task learning. The experimental results on two benchmark datasets validate that our approach can effectively improve t…
University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；University of Fribourg（弗里堡大学）；Swisscom AG（瑞士电信公司）
We introduce a dictionary containing forms of common words in various Swiss German dialects normalized into High German. As Swiss German is, for now, a predominantly spoken language, there is a significant variation in the written forms, even between speakers of the same dialect. To alleviate the uncertainty associated with this diversity, we complement the pairs of Swiss German - High German words with the Swiss German phonetic transcriptions (SAMPA). This dictionary becomes thus the first resource to combine large-scale spontaneous translation with phonetic transcriptions. Moreover, we contr…
Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM)（魁北克大学蒙特利尔分校）；HEC Montréal（蒙特利尔高等商学院）；Groupe d’études et de recherche en analyse des décisions (GERAD)（决策分析研究小组）
A dictionary defines words in terms of other words. Definitions can tell you the meanings of words you don't know, but only if you know the meanings of the defining words. How many words do you need to know (and which ones) in order to be able to learn all the rest from definitions? We reduced dictionaries to their "grounding kernels" (GKs), about 10% of the dictionary, from which all the other words could be defined. The GK words turned out to have psycholinguistic correlates: they were learned at an earlier age and more concrete than the rest of the dictionary. But one can compress still mor…
University of Rome Tor Vergata（罗马第二大学）；Guglielmo Marconi University（古列尔莫·马可尼大学）
Word embeddings are powerful dictionaries, which may easily capture language variations. However, these dictionaries fail to give sense to rare words, which are surprisingly often covered by traditional dictionaries. In this paper, we propose to use definitions retrieved in traditional dictionaries to produce word embeddings for rare words. For this purpose, we introduce two methods: Definition Neural Network (DefiNNet) and Define BERT (DefBERT). In our experiments, DefiNNet and DefBERT significantly outperform state-of-the-art as well as baseline methods devised for producing embeddings of un…
Cross-lingual model transfer is a compelling and popular method for predicting annotations in a low-resource language, whereby parallel corpora provide a bridge to a high-resource language and its associated annotated corpora. However, parallel data is not readily available for many languages, limiting the applicability of these approaches. We address these drawbacks in our framework which takes advantage of cross-lingual word embeddings trained solely on a high coverage bilingual dictionary. We propose a novel neural network model for joint training from both sources of data based on cross-li…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
A reverse dictionary takes the description of a target word as input and outputs the target word together with other words that match the description. Existing reverse dictionary methods cannot deal with highly variable input queries and low-frequency target words successfully. Inspired by the description-to-word inference process of humans, we propose the multi-channel reverse dictionary model, which can mitigate the two problems simultaneously. Our model comprises a sentence encoder and multiple predictors. The predictors are expected to identify different characteristics of the target word …
University of Leicester（莱斯特大学）；Lobachevsky University（罗巴切夫斯基大学）
In this paper, we present a scientific corpus of abstracts of academic papers in English -- Leicester Scientific Corpus (LSC). The LSC contains 1,673,824 abstracts of research articles and proceeding papers indexed by Web of Science (WoS) in which publication year is 2014. Each abstract is assigned to at least one of 252 subject categories. Paper metadata include these categories and the number of citations. We then develop scientific dictionaries named Leicester Scientific Dictionary (LScD) and Leicester Scientific Dictionary-Core (LScDC), where words are extracted from the LSC. The LScD is a…
Sentiments of words differ from one corpus to another. Inducing general sentiment lexicons for languages and using them cannot, in general, produce meaningful results for different domains. In this paper, we combine contextual and supervised information with the general semantic representations of words occurring in the dictionary. Contexts of words help us capture the domain-specific information and supervised scores of words are indicative of the polarities of those words. When we combine supervised features of words with the features extracted from their dictionary definitions, we observe a…
SLoW: Select Low-frequency Words! Automatic Dictionary Selection for Translation on Large Language Models
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Southeast University（东南大学）；FaceMind Corporation（FaceMind公司）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University（吉林大学计算机科学与技术学院）
University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；University of Michigan Ann Arbor（密歇根大学安娜堡分校）；San Diego State University（圣地亚哥州立大学）
This paper describes our system for the SemEval2022 task of matching dictionary glosses to word embeddings. We focus on the Reverse Dictionary Track of the competition, which maps multilingual glosses to reconstructed vector representations. More specifically, models convert the input of sentences to three types of embeddings: SGNS, Char, and Electra. We propose several experiments for applying neural network cells, general multilingual and multitask structures, and language-agnostic tricks to the task. We also provide comparisons over different types of word embeddings and ablation studies to…
Innopolis University（Innopolis 大学）；Kazan Federal University（喀山联邦大学）
Concrete/abstract words are used in a growing number of psychological and neurophysiological research. For a few languages, large dictionaries have been created manually. This is a very time-consuming and costly process. To generate large high-quality dictionaries of concrete/abstract words automatically one needs extrapolating the expert assessments obtained on smaller samples. The research question that arises is how small such samples should be to do a good enough extrapolation. In this paper, we present a method for automatic ranking concreteness of words and propose an approach to signifi…
Finding the appropriate words to convey concepts (i.e., lexical access) is essential for effective communication. Reverse dictionaries fulfill this need by helping individuals to find the word(s) which could relate to a specific concept or idea. To the best of our knowledge, this resource has not been available for the Persian language. In this paper, we compare four different architectures for implementing a Persian reverse dictionary (PREDICT). We evaluate our models using (phrase,word) tuples extracted from the only Persian dictionaries available online, namely Amid, Moein, and Dehkhoda whe…
We describe a method of using statistically-collected Chinese character groups from a corpus to augment a Chinese dictionary. The method is particularly useful for extracting domain-specific and regional words not readily available in machine-readable dictionaries. Output was evaluated both using human evaluators and against a previously available dictionary. We also evaluated performance improvement in automatic Chinese tokenization. Results show that our method outputs legitimate words, acronymic constructions, idioms, names and titles, as well as technical compounds, many of which were lack…
In Japanese text-to-speech (TTS), it is necessary to add accent information to the input sentence. However, there are a limited number of publicly available accent dictionaries, and those dictionaries e.g. UniDic, do not contain many compound words, proper nouns, etc., which are required in a practical TTS system. In order to build a large scale accent dictionary that contains those words, the authors developed an accent estimation technique that predicts the accent of a word from its limited information, namely the surface (e.g. kanji) and the yomi (simplified phonetic information). It is exp…
