@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2023-assisting,
    title = "Assisting Language Learners: Automated Trans-Lingual Definition Generation via Contrastive Prompt Learning",
    author = "Zhang, Hengyuan  and
      Li, Dawei  and
      Li, Yanran  and
      Shang, Chenming  and
      Shi, Chufan  and
      Jiang, Yong",
    editor = {Kochmar, Ekaterina  and
      Burstein, Jill  and
      Horbach, Andrea  and
      Laarmann-Quante, Ronja  and
      Madnani, Nitin  and
      Tack, Ana{\"\i}s  and
      Yaneva, Victoria  and
      Yuan, Zheng  and
      Zesch, Torsten},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.bea-1.23",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.bea-1.23",
    pages = "260--274",
    abstract = "The standard definition generation task requires to automatically produce mono-lingual definitions (e.g., English definitions for English words), but ignores that the generated definitions may also consist of unfamiliar words for language learners. In this work, we propose a novel task of Trans-Lingual Definition Generation (TLDG), which aims to generate definitions in another language, i.e., the native speaker{'}s language. Initially, we explore the unsupervised manner of this task and build up a simple implementation of fine-tuning the multi-lingual machine translation model. Then, we develop two novel methods, Prompt Combination and Contrastive Prompt Learning, for further enhancing the quality of the generation. Our methods are evaluated against the baseline Pipeline method in both rich- and low-resource settings, and we empirically establish its superiority in generating higher-quality trans-lingual definitions.",
}

The standard definition generation task requires to automatically produce mono-lingual definitions (e.g., English definitions for English words), but ignores that the generated definitions may also consist of unfamiliar words for language learners. In this work, we propose a novel task of Trans-Lingual Definition Generation (TLDG), which aims to generate definitions in another language, i.e., the native speaker{'}s language. Initially, we explore the unsupervised manner of this task and build up a simple implementation of fine-tuning the multi-lingual machine translation model. Then, we develop two novel methods, Prompt Combination and Contrastive Prompt Learning, for further enhancing the quality of the generation. Our methods are evaluated against the baseline Pipeline method in both rich- and low-resource settings, and we empirically establish its superiority in generating higher-quality trans-lingual definitions.
Zhang, Hengyuan Li, Dawei Li, Yanran Shang, Chenming Shi, Chufan Jiang, Yong
Assisting Language Learners: Automated Trans-Lingual Definition Generation via Contrastive Prompt Learning