  Reverse dictionary is the task to find the proper target word given the word
description. In this paper, we tried to incorporate BERT into this task.
However, since BERT is based on the byte-pair-encoding (BPE) subword encoding,
it is nontrivial to make BERT generate a word given the description. We propose
a simple but effective method to make BERT generate the target word for this
specific task. Besides, the cross-lingual reverse dictionary is the task to
find the proper target word described in another language. Previous models have
to keep two different word embeddings and learn to align these embeddings.
Nevertheless, by using the Multilingual BERT (mBERT), we can efficiently
conduct the cross-lingual reverse dictionary with one subword embedding, and
the alignment between languages is not necessary. More importantly, mBERT can
achieve remarkable cross-lingual reverse dictionary performance even without
the parallel corpus, which means it can conduct the cross-lingual reverse
dictionary with only corresponding monolingual data. Code is publicly available
at https://github.com/yhcc/BertForRD.git.
