Sõnajaht: Definition Embeddings and Semantic Search for Reverse Dictionary Creation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dorkin, Aleksei, Sirts, Kairit
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Dorkin, Aleksei
Sirts, Kairit
author_facet Dorkin, Aleksei
Sirts, Kairit
contents We present an information retrieval based reverse dictionary system using modern pre-trained language models and approximate nearest neighbors search algorithms. The proposed approach is applied to an existing Estonian language lexicon resource, Sõnaveeb (word web), with the purpose of enhancing and enriching it by introducing cross-lingual reverse dictionary functionality powered by semantic search. The performance of the system is evaluated using both an existing labeled English dataset of words and definitions that is extended to contain also Estonian and Russian translations, and a novel unlabeled evaluation approach that extracts the evaluation data from the lexicon resource itself using synonymy relations. Evaluation results indicate that the information retrieval based semantic search approach without any model training is feasible, producing median rank of 1 in the monolingual setting and median rank of 2 in the cross-lingual setting using the unlabeled evaluation approach, with models trained for cross-lingual retrieval and including Estonian in their training data showing superior performance in our particular task.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_19430
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sõnajaht: Definition Embeddings and Semantic Search for Reverse Dictionary Creation
Dorkin, Aleksei
Sirts, Kairit
Computation and Language
We present an information retrieval based reverse dictionary system using modern pre-trained language models and approximate nearest neighbors search algorithms. The proposed approach is applied to an existing Estonian language lexicon resource, Sõnaveeb (word web), with the purpose of enhancing and enriching it by introducing cross-lingual reverse dictionary functionality powered by semantic search. The performance of the system is evaluated using both an existing labeled English dataset of words and definitions that is extended to contain also Estonian and Russian translations, and a novel unlabeled evaluation approach that extracts the evaluation data from the lexicon resource itself using synonymy relations. Evaluation results indicate that the information retrieval based semantic search approach without any model training is feasible, producing median rank of 1 in the monolingual setting and median rank of 2 in the cross-lingual setting using the unlabeled evaluation approach, with models trained for cross-lingual retrieval and including Estonian in their training data showing superior performance in our particular task.
title Sõnajaht: Definition Embeddings and Semantic Search for Reverse Dictionary Creation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.19430