"Definition Modeling: To model definitions." Generating Definitions With
  Little to No Semantics
Vincent Segonne Timothee Mickus
Definition Modeling, the task of generating definitions, was first proposed
as a means to evaluate the semantic quality of word embeddings-a coherent
lexical semantic representations of a word in context should contain all the
information necessary to generate its definition. The relative novelty of this
task entails that we do not know which factors are actually relied upon by a
Definition Modeling system. In this paper, we present evidence that the task
may not involve as much semantics as one might expect: we show how an earlier
model from the literature is both rather insensitive to semantic aspects such
as explicit polysemy, as well as reliant on formal similarities between
headwords and words occurring in its glosses, casting doubt on the validity of
the task as a means to evaluate embeddings.