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In this paper, we study whether it is possible to utilize\ndistributed representations to generate dictionary definitions of words, as a\nmore direct and transparent representation of the embeddings' semantics. We\nintroduce definition modeling, the task of generating a definition for a given\nword and its embedding. We present several definition model architectures based\non recurrent neural networks, and experiment with the models over multiple data\nsets. Our results show that a model that controls dependencies between the word\nbeing defined and the definition words performs significantly better, and that\na character-level convolution layer designed to leverage morphology can\ncomplement word-level embeddings. Finally, an error analysis suggests that the\nerrors made by a definition model may provide insight into the shortcomings of\nword embeddings.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00394v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.00394v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"definition-modeling-learning-to-define-word","repo_url":"https://github.com/northanapon/dict-definition","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"definition-modeling-learning-to-define-word","repo_url":"https://github.com/websail-nu/torch-defseq","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"torch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"word-embeddings","task_name":"Word Embeddings"},{"task_slug":"word-similarity","task_name":"Word Similarity"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1612.00394","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"1612.00394"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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