CLiP Colloquium - Nathan Schneider / Natural Metalanguage Processing
CLiP Colloquium - Nathan Schneider / Natural Metalanguage Processing
Wednesday September 30, Nathan Schneider from Georgetown University, Departments of Linguistics and Computer Science, presents the CLiP Colloquium talk on "Natural Metalanguage Processing," abstracted below. Professor Schneider works on computational approaches to syntax, semantics, and a bit of psycholinguistics, along with application-focused work in NLP and legal studies.
People don't just talk with natural language: sometimes, they talk about it. Dictionaries, language learning resources, scholarly works in linguistics and literature, and even cultural and legal discourse are full of metalanguage explicating linguistic patterns and practices. In this talk I will reflect on metalanguage and what it has to offer for NLP. Are LLMs fluent in metalanguage, and can they provide accurate metalinguistic explanations? I will present case studies looking at two metalinguistically rich genres: (i) online language discussion forums, and (ii) judicial rulings involving language interpretation. Nuanced results from these and other studies indicate the metalinguistic outputs of today's LLMs cannot always be taken at face value—yet there is enormous potential for systems to better leverage existing metalinguistic data and to assist users with metalinguistic tasks. (Joint work with many collaborators; see Schneider & Anastasopoulos 2026 for a high-level overview.)