NJUS: Not Just Semantics: Word Meaning Negotiation in Social Media and Spoken Interaction
Short description
Word meaning negotiations (WMNs) concern what a word means or should mean. Negotiations often start with someone remarking on a word choice by another participant. They then discuss the meaning of the word, by giving examples and definitions and by contrasting the word to other words. The aim of this project is to investigate how word meanings are interactively negotiated in social media and in spoken interaction. We will collect a corpus of WMNs and analyse them quantitatively and qualitatively. We will also develop tools for automatically detecting and analysing WMNs. Learning more about WMNs will allow for a better understanding about how words come to have the meanings they do in situated interaction. We will learn about why people talk (and even fight) about meanings, and why talk about meaning is not "just semantics".