Distinguishing Address vs. Reference Mentions of Personal Names in Text
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Melissa Ferguson, Stav Atir
Abstract
Detecting named entities in text has long been a core NLP task. However, not much work has gone into distinguishing whether an entity mention is addressing the entity vs. referring to the entity; e.g., John, would you turn the light off? vs. John turned the light off. While this distinction is marked by a vocative case marker in some languages, many modern Indo-European languages such as English do not use such explicit vocative markers, and the distinction is left to be interpreted in context. In this paper, we present a new annotated dataset that captures the address vs. reference distinction in English, an automatic tagger that performs at 85% accuracy in making this distinction, and demonstrate how this distinction is important in NLP and computational social science applications in English language.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.findings-acl.425
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 6801–6809
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.425
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.425
- Cite (ACL):
- Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Melissa Ferguson, and Stav Atir. 2023. Distinguishing Address vs. Reference Mentions of Personal Names in Text. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 6801–6809, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Distinguishing Address vs. Reference Mentions of Personal Names in Text (Prabhakaran et al., Findings 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2023.findings-acl.425.pdf