Cross-Lingual Wolastoqey-English Definition Modelling

Abstract

Definition modelling is the task of automatically generating a dictionary-style definition given a target word. In this paper, we consider cross-lingual definition generation. Specifically, we generate English definitions for Wolastoqey (Malecite-Passamaquoddy) words. Wolastoqey is an endangered, low-resource polysynthetic language. We hypothesize that sub-word representations based on byte pair encoding (Sennrich et al., 2016) can be leveraged to represent morphologically-complex Wolastoqey words and overcome the challenge of not having large corpora available for training. Our experimental results demonstrate that this approach outperforms baseline methods in terms of BLEU score.

Tasks

Reproductions