Definition Extraction Task

A Definition Extraction Task is an information extraction task that can solve a definition creation task given a text corpus.

• Context:
  • Task Input: textual data.
  • Task Output: Definition (e.g. Definitional Sentence, Definitional Paragraph).
  • Task Requirements:
    • an information extraction system,
    • a definition creation system.
  • It can be solved by a Definition Extraction System that implements a Definition Extraction Algorithm.
  • It can range from (typically) being a Definitional Sentence Extraction Task to being a Definitional Paragraph Extraction Task.
  • It can range from being a Human-Performed Definition Extraction Task to being an Automated Definition Extraction Task (solved by a definition extraction system).
  • It can be supported by a Definitional Sentence Classification Task and/or a Definitional Sentence Retrieval Task.
  • It can support a Definitional Question Answering Task.
  • …
• Example(s):
  • Automated Definitional Sentence Extraction Task, such as:
    • .
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Definition Generation Task.
  • a Relation Extraction Task.
• See: Hypernym Relation, Lexical Definition.

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References

2019

• (Spala et al., 2019) ⇒ Sasha Spala, Nicholas A. Miller, Yiming Yang, Franck Dernoncourt, and Carl Dockhorn. (2019). “DEFT: A Corpus for Definition Extraction in Free- and Semi-structured Text.” In: Proceedings of the 13th Linguistic Annotation Workshop.
  • QUOTE: Definition extraction has been a popular topic in NLP research for well more than a decade, but has been historically limited to well-defined, structured, and narrow conditions. In reality, natural language is messy, and messy data requires both complex solutions and data that reflects that reality. In this paper, we present a robust English corpus and annotation schema that allows us to explore the less straightforward examples of term-definition structures in free and semi-structured text. …

2016

• (Espinosa-Anke et al., 2016) ⇒ Luis Espinosa-Anke, Roberto Carlini, Horacio Saggion, and Francesco Ronzano. (2016). “DEFEXT: A Semi Supervised Definition Extraction Tool.” In: GLOBALEX 2016 Lexicographic Resources for Human Language Technology Workshop Programme.
  • QUOTE: ... …

2013

• (Boella & Di Caro, 2013) ⇒ Guido Boella, and Luigi Di Caro. (2013). “Extracting Definitions and Hypernym Relations Relying on Syntactic Dependencies and Support Vector Machines.” In: Proceedings of the 51st annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics (ACL-2013).

2010a

• (Navigli et al., 2010) ⇒ Roberto Navigli, Paola Velardi, and Juana Maria Ruiz-Martınez. (2010). “An Annotated Dataset for Extracting Definitions and Hypernyms from the Web..” In: Proceedings of the Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2010).

2010b

• (Navigli & Velardi, 2010) ⇒ Roberto Navigli, and Paola Velardi. (2010). “Learning Word-class Lattices for Definition and Hypernym Extraction.” In: Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2010).
  • QUOTE: Definition extraction is the task of automatically identifying definitional sentences within texts.

2009

• (Sierra et al., 2009) ⇒ Gerardo Sierra, Mara Pozzi and Juan-Manuel Torres (2009, September). "Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Definition Extraction". In: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Definition Extraction (WDE 2009).
  • QUOTE: In the last few years the automatic extraction of definitions from textual data has become a common research topic in several domains of Natural Language Processing. These include:
    • Definition extraction as a methodological resource for fields as different as computational semantics, information extraction, text mining, ontology development, WEB semantics and elearning.
    • The conception of definition extraction as a self-challenging task, in particular in computational lexicography and terminography, fields oriented towards the design and implementation of electronic tools such as lexical knowledge bases, machine-readable dictionaries, terminological databases, thesauri, machine translation systems or question-answering systems.

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