Article Structure
Abstract
Metalanguage is an essential linguistic mechanism which allows us to communicate explicit information about language itself.
Introduction
In order to understand the language that we speak, we sometimes must refer to the language itself.
Metalanguage and the Use-Mention Distinction1
Although the reader is likely to be familiar with the terms use-mention distinction and metalanguage, the topic merits further explanation to precisely establish the phenomenon being studied.
The Mentioned Language Corpus
“Laboratory examples” of mentioned language (such as the examples thus far in this paper) only begin to illustrate the variation in the phenomenon.
Discussion
The Enhanced Cues corpus confirms some of the hypothesized properties of metalanguage and yields some unexpected insights.
Related Work
The use-mention distinction has enjoyed a long history of chiefly theoretical discussion.
Future Work
As explained in the introduction, the longterm goal of this research program is to apply an understanding of metalanguage to enhance language technologies.
Topics
natural language
- However, the study of the phenomenon in natural language is relatively nascent, and its incorporation into language technologies is almost nonexistent.Page 1, “Introduction”
- Moreover, applications of natural language processing generally lack the ability to recognize and interpret metalanguage (Anderson et al.Page 1, “Introduction”
- Applications of natural language understanding cannot process metalanguage without detecting it, especially when upstream components (such as parsers) mangle its structure.Page 2, “Introduction”
See all papers in Proc. ACL 2012 that mention natural language.
See all papers in Proc. ACL that mention natural language.
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