What’s in a Definition? An Investigation of Semantic Features in Lexical Dictionaries

Luigi Di Caro

2020

Abstract

Encoding and generating word meanings as short definitions for user- and machine-consumption dictionaries is still a usually adopted strategy within interpretable lexical-semantic resources. Definitions have the property of being natural to be created by humans, while several techniques have been proposed for the automatic extraction from large corpora. However, the reversed process of going back to the words (i.e., onomasiological search) is all but simple for both humans and machines. Indeed, definitions show context- and conceptual-based properties which influence their quality. In this contribution, I want to draw the attention to this problem, through a simple content-to-form experimentation with humans in the loop. The results give some first insight on the relevance of the problem from a computational perspective. In addition, I analyzed (both quantitatively and qualitatively) a set of 1,901 word definitions taken from different sources, towards the modeling of features for their generation and automatic extraction.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Di Caro L. (2020). What’s in a Definition? An Investigation of Semantic Features in Lexical Dictionaries.In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST, ISBN 978-989-758-478-7, pages 225-232. DOI: 10.5220/0010116902250232

in Bibtex Style

@conference{webist20,
author={Luigi Di Caro},
title={What’s in a Definition? An Investigation of Semantic Features in Lexical Dictionaries},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,},
year={2020},
pages={225-232},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010116902250232},
isbn={978-989-758-478-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,
TI - What’s in a Definition? An Investigation of Semantic Features in Lexical Dictionaries
SN - 978-989-758-478-7
AU - Di Caro L.
PY - 2020
SP - 225
EP - 232
DO - 10.5220/0010116902250232