ACNLP at SemEval-2020 Task 6: A Supervised Approach for Definition Extraction

AbstractWe describe our contribution to two of the subtasks of SemEval 2020 Task 6, DeftEval: Extracting term-definition pairs in free text. The system for Subtask 1: Sentence Classification is based on a transformer architecture where we use transfer learning to fine-tune a pretrained model on the downstream task, and the one for Subtask 3: Relation Classification uses a Random Forest classifier with handcrafted dedicated features. Our systems respectively achieve 0.830 and 0.994 F1-scores on the official test set, and we believe that the insights derived from our study are potentially relevant to help advance the research on definition extraction.