SemEval-2020 Task 6: Definition extraction from free text with the DEFT corpus
This work addresses the challenge of definition extraction for natural language processing researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing research with a new shared task.
The paper tackled the problem of extracting definitions from free text by introducing DeftEval, a SemEval shared task, which resulted in a corpus and evaluation framework for handling complex definitions without explicit indicators.
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.