SemEval-2020 Task 6: Definition extraction from free text with the DEFT corpus

TL;DR

This paper introduces DeftEval, a shared task for extracting definitions from free text, addressing complex linguistic challenges with a new corpus and three subtasks, advancing the field of definition extraction.

Contribution

It presents a new corpus and a shared task with three subtasks, tackling the complexity of definitions in natural language for the first time.

Findings

Multiple approaches tested on the corpus

Subtask performance varied significantly

Insights into challenges of definition extraction

Abstract

Research on definition extraction has been conducted for well over a decade, largely with significant constraints on the type of definitions considered. In this work, we present DeftEval, a SemEval shared task in which participants must extract definitions from free text using a term-definition pair corpus that reflects the complex reality of definitions in natural language. Definitions and glosses in free text often appear without explicit indicators, across sentences boundaries, or in an otherwise complex linguistic manner. DeftEval involved 3 distinct subtasks: 1)Sentence classification, 2) sequence labeling, and 3) relation extraction.