Distinguishing use and mention in natural language

  • Authors:
  • Shomir Wilson

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Maryland, College Park, MD

  • Venue:
  • HLT-SRWS '10 Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Student Research Workshop
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

When humans communicate via natural language, they frequently make use of metalanguage to clarify what they mean and promote a felicitous exchange of ideas. One key aspect of metalanguage is the mention of words and phrases, as distinguished from their use. This paper presents ongoing work on identifying and categorizing instances of language-mention, with the goal of building a system capable of automatic recognition of the phenomenon. A definition of language-mention and a corpus of instances gathered from Wikipedia are discussed, and the future direction of the project is described.