About Neural Networks and Writing Definitions

In this article, we describe the current state of the field of NLP (Natural Language Processing) and detail the applications and trends that are of interest to lexicographers. We begin with a brief overview of how dictionaries have been used in the NLP community, particularly to introduce semantic knowledge in NLP systems. We follow up with a detailed account of one of the most well-known types of NLP semantic representations, namely word embeddings, and some of their limitations—in particular, how they fail to relate words to real-world objects. We then argue that the task of Definition Modeling, which consists of generating dictionary definitions from word embeddings, is well suited to studying these limitations and highlight how current issues in automated evaluation of NLP systems specifically hinder this investigation.