Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Dictionary definitions are historically the arbitrator of what words mean, but this primacy has come under threat by recent progress in NLP, including word embeddings and generative models like ChatGPT. We present an exploratory study of the degree of alignment between word definitions from classical dictionaries and these newer computational artifacts. Specifically, we compare definitions from three published dictionaries to those generated from variants of ChatGPT. We show that (i) definitions from different traditional dictionaries exhibit more surface form similarity than do model-generated definitions, (ii) that the ChatGPT definitions are highly accurate, comparable to traditional dictionaries, and (iii) ChatGPT-based embedding definitions retain their accuracy even on low frequency words, much better than GloVE and FastText word embeddings.
Authors: Bach Pham, JuiHsuan Wong, Samuel Kim, Yunting Yin, Steven Skiena
Institutions: Earlham College, Stony Brook University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4411447466