# Rosetta Stone at KSAA-RD Shared Task: A Hop From Language Modeling To Word--Definition Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15823 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15823/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [AraBERT: Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00104/) (2020)
- [Super-Convergence: Very Fast Training of Neural Networks Using Large Learning Rates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07120/) (2017)
- [ARBERT & MARBERT: Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01785/) (2020)
- [The Interplay of Variant, Size, and Task Type in Arabic Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06678/) (2021)
- [AraT5: Text-to-Text Transformers for Arabic Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12068/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Machine Translation for Cross-lingual Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14240/) (2023)
- [Learning to Understand Phrases by Embedding the Dictionary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00548/) (2015)
- [BERT for Monolingual and Cross-Lingual Reverse Dictionary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14790/) (2020)
- [Learning to Represent Bilingual Dictionaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.03726/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A Reverse Dictionary is a tool enabling users to discover a word based on its provided definition, meaning, or description. Such a technique proves valuable in various scenarios, aiding language learners who possess a description of a word without its identity, and benefiting writers seeking precise terminology. These scenarios often encapsulate what is referred to as the "Tip-of-the-Tongue" (TOT) phenomena. In this work, we present our winning solution for the Arabic Reverse Dictionary shared task. This task focuses on deriving a vector representation of an Arabic word from its accompanying description. The shared task encompasses two distinct subtasks: the first involves an Arabic definition as input, while the second employs an English definition. For the first subtask, our approach relies on an ensemble of finetuned Arabic BERT-based models, predicting the word embedding for a given definition. The final representation is obtained through averaging the output embeddings from each model within the ensemble. In contrast, the most effective solution for the second subtask involves translating the English test definitions into Arabic and applying them to the finetuned models originally trained for the first subtask. This straightforward method achieves the highest score across both subtasks.