Decompose, Fuse and Generate: A Formation-Informed Method for Chinese Definition Generation


Abstract in English

In this paper, we tackle the task of Definition Generation (DG) in Chinese, which aims at automatically generating a definition for a word. Most existing methods take the source word as an indecomposable semantic unit. However, in parataxis languages like Chinese, word meanings can be composed using the word formation process, where a word (桃花'', peach-blossom) is formed by formation components (桃'', peach; 花'', flower) using a formation rule (Modifier-Head). Inspired by this process, we propose to enhance DG with word formation features. We build a formation-informed dataset, and propose a model DeFT, which Decomposes words into formation features, dynamically Fuses different features through a gating mechanism, and generaTes word definitions. Experimental results show that our method is both effective and robust.

References used

https://aclanthology.org/

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