Lexical Reference: a Semantic Matching Subtask.

Semantic lexical matching is a prominent subtask within text understanding applications. Yet, it is rarely evaluated in a direct manner. This paper proposes a definition for lexical reference which captures the common goals of lexical matching. Based on this definition we created and analyzed a test dataset that was utilized to directly evaluate, compare and improve lexical matching models. We suggest that such decomposition of the global semantic matching task is critical in order to fully understand and improve individual components.