arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

Towards Automated Lexicography: Generating and Evaluating Definitions for Learner's Dictionaries

The paper tackles the problem of automatically generating dictionary definitions for learner’s dictionaries, focusing on simplicity and clarity. It introduces a new evaluation framework that uses large language models as judges, validated against human annotators with comparable agreement levels. The authors also present an iterative simplification approach that produces definitions scoring highly on their criteria and exhibiting lexical simplicity.

By Yusuke Ide, Adam Nohejl, Joshua Tanner, Hitomi Yanaka, Christopher Lindsay, Taro Watanabe
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

Revisiting Lexicon Evaluation in Unsupervised Word Discovery

The paper critiques the normalized edit distance metric used for evaluating lexicons derived from unsupervised word discovery, noting its bias toward large clusters and its failure to account for the distribution of true classes across clusters. It proposes two new metrics—one that weights cluster size when measuring within‑cluster consistency and another that evaluates how true words are spread across clusters—drawing on clustering theory. Experiments on synthetic and real‑world lexicons show that these combined metrics better correlate with ground‑truth distributions and are more robust to evaluation biases.

By Simon Malan, Danel Slabbert, Herman Kamper