Examples where syntactic cues are leveraged include medical acronym expansion (Pustejovsky et al., 2001), hyponym-hypernym extraction and detection (Hearst, 1992;Shwartz et al., 2016), and definition extraction either from the web (Saggion and Gaizauskas, 2004), scholarly articles (Reiplinger et al., 2012), and more recently from Wikipedia-like definitions (Boella et al., 2014).
the interplay between syntactic information and the generalization potential of neural networks remains unexplored in definition modeling, although intuitively it seems reasonable to assume that a syntax-informed architecture should have more tools at its disposal for discriminating between definitional and non-definitional knowledge.