Human innovation in language, such as inventing new words, is a challenge for pretrained language models. We assess the ability of one large model, GPT-3, to process new words and decide on their meaning. We create a set of nonce words and prompt GPT-3 to generate their dictionary definitions. We find GPT-3 produces plausible definitions that align with human judgments. Moreover, GPT-3’s definitions are sometimes preferred to those invented by humans, signaling its intriguing ability not just to adapt, but to add to the evolving vocabulary of the English language.
CITATION STYLE
Malkin, N., Lanka, S., Goel, P., Rao, S., & Jojic, N. (2021). GPT Perdetry Test: Generating new meanings for new words. In NAACL-HLT 2021 - 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference (pp. 5542–5553). Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.439
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