Definition Frames: Using Definitions for Hybrid Concept Representations

Concept representations is a particularly active area in NLP. Although recent advances in distributional semantics have shown tremendous improvements in performance, they still lack semantic interpretability. In this paper, we introduce a novel hybrid representation called Definition Frames, which is extracted from definitions under the formulation of domain-transfer Relation Extraction. Definition Frames are easily reformulated to a matrix representation where each row is semantically meaningful. This results in a fluid representation, where we can prune dimension(s) according to the type of information we want to retain for any specific task. Our results show that Definition Frames (1) maintain the significant semantic information of the original definition (human evaluation) and (2) have competitive performance with other distributional semantic approaches on word similarity tasks. Furthermore, our experiments show substantial improvements over word-embeddings when fine-tuned to a task even using only a linear transform.