We tackle the task of mention detection for pair-programming dialogue, a setting which adds several challenges to the task due to the characteristics of natural dialogue, the dynamic environment of the dialogue task, and the domain-specific vocabulary and structures. We compare recent variants of the Llama and GPT families and explore different prompt and context engineering approaches. While aspects like hesitations and references to read-out code and variable names made the task challenging, GPT 4.1 approximated human performance when we provided few-shot examples similar to the inference text and corrected formatting errors.

Natural Language Processing tools and resources have been so far mainly created and trained for standard varieties of language. Nowadays, with the use of large amounts of data gathered from social media, other varieties and registers need to be processed, which may present other challenges and difficulties. In this work, we focus on English and we present a preliminary analysis by comparing the TwitterAAE corpus, which is annotated for ethnicity, and WordNet by quantifying and explaining the online language that WordNet misses.