On the Importance of Distinguishing Word Meaning Representations: A Case Study on Reverse Dictionary Mapping

AbstractMeaning conflation deficiency is one of the main limiting factors of word representations which, given their widespread use at the core of many NLP systems, can lead to inaccurate semantic understanding of the input text and inevitably hamper the performance. Sense representations target this problem. However, their potential impact has rarely been investigated in downstream NLP applications. Through a set of experiments on a state-of-the-art reverse dictionary system based on neural networks, we show that a simple adjustment aimed at addressing the meaning conflation deficiency can lead to substantial improvements.