[CL+NLP Lunch] CL+NLP Lunch Tuesday April 23 @ noon

[Dani Yogatama]

Hi all,

We are excited to announce that Shomir Wilson will speak to the the
CL+NLPLunch.
Details are included below.
Lunch will be provided.


Thanks,
Dani

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* CL+NLP Lunch* (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nlp-lunch/)
*Speaker*: Shomir Wilson, Carnegie Mellon University
*Date*: Tuesday, April 23, 2013
*Time*: 12:00 noon
*Venue*: GHC 4405

*Title*:
A Computational Approach to Metalanguage and the Use-Mention Distinction

*Abstract*:
In linguistic communication it is sometimes necessary to refer to features
of language, such as orthography, vocabulary, structure, pragmatics, or
meaning. Metalanguage enables a speaker to select a linguistically-relevant
referent over (or in addition to) other typical referents. Metalanguage is
both pervasive and, paradoxically, the subject of limited attention in
research on language technologies. The ability to produce and understand
metalanguage is a core linguistic competency that allows humans to
establish grounding, verify audience understanding, and maintain
communication channels in spite of perturbations. Metalanguage encodes
unusually direct and salient information about language, but simple
examples thwart parsers and other common language analysis tools. Its roles
in L2 language acquisition, expression of sentiment towards others'
utterances, and some theories of irony have been noted as well.

In this talk, I will first present on a framework for identifying and
analyzing instances of metalanguage, in an effort to reconcile the many
theoretical treatments of the phenomenon for empirical use. This will
include a definition of mentioned language, a common form of metalanguage
with many practical roles in communication. I will then describe the
creation of the first tagged and delineated corpus of English metalanguage,
built by applying a combination of stylistic and lexical heuristics to
Wikipedia article text. Finally, I will present preliminary results from
using NLP methods to automatically identify mentioned language in text.
These contributions validate the feasibility of building language
technologies that can exploit the salient information about language that
metalanguage encodes.

*Biography*:
Shomir Wilson is a Postdoctoral Associate with the Mobile Commerce Lab at
Carnegie Mellon University's Institute for Software Research. He is also an
NSF International Research Fellow, and will spend a year at the University
of Edinburgh starting this July. He received his PhD in Computer Science
from the University of Maryland in 2011, and during graduate school he
twice received grants from the NSF's East Asia and Pacific Summer
Institutes. His most recent research is in usable privacy and security; he
is also interested in how people speak about language, and what computers
can learn from metalanguage and metadialogue.
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