We build a dual-way neural dictionary to retrieve words given definitions, and produce definitions for queried words. The model learns the two tasks simultaneously and handles unknown words via embeddings.

It casts a word or a definition to the same representation space through a shared layer, then generates the other form in a multi-task fashion. Our method achieves promising automatic scores on previous benchmarks without extra resources.

Human annotators prefer the model's outputs in both reference-less and reference-based evaluation, indicating its practicality. Analysis suggests that multiple objectives benefit learning.