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.