Interpretable Word Sense Representations via Definition Generation: The Case of Semantic Change Analysis

Mario Giulianelli, Iris Luden, Raquel Fernandez, Andrey Kutuzov


Abstract
We propose using automatically generated natural language definitions of contextualised word usages as interpretable word and word sense representations. Given a collection of usage examples for a target word, and the corresponding data-driven usage clusters (i.e., word senses), a definition is generated for each usage with a specialised Flan-T5 language model, and the most prototypical definition in a usage cluster is chosen as the sense label. We demonstrate how the resulting sense labels can make existing approaches to semantic change analysis more interpretable, and how they can allow users — historical linguists, lexicographers, or social scientists — to explore and intuitively explain diachronic trajectories of word meaning. Semantic change analysis is only one of many possible applications of the ‘definitions as representations’ paradigm. Beyond being human-readable, contextualised definitions also outperform token or usage sentence embeddings in word-in-context semantic similarity judgements, making them a new promising type of lexical representation for NLP.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.176
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3130–3148
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.176
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.176
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mario Giulianelli, Iris Luden, Raquel Fernandez, and Andrey Kutuzov. 2023. Interpretable Word Sense Representations via Definition Generation: The Case of Semantic Change Analysis. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3130–3148, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Interpretable Word Sense Representations via Definition Generation: The Case of Semantic Change Analysis (Giulianelli et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.176.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.176.mp4