Toward Automatic Processing of English Metalanguage
Shomir Wilson · 2013
The metalinguistic facilities of natural lan-guage are crucial to our ability to communi-cate, but the patterns behind the appearance of metalanguage—and thus the clues for how we may instruct computers to detect it—have re-mained relatively unknown. This paper de-scribes the first results on the feasibility of au-tomatically identifying metalanguage in Eng-lish text. A core metalinguistic vocabulary has been identified, supporting intuitions about the phenomenon and aiding in its detection and delineation. These results open the door to ap-plications that can extract the direct, salient in-formation that metalanguage encodes. 1