@inproceedings{prabhakaran-etal-2023-distinguishing,
    title = "Distinguishing Address vs. Reference Mentions of Personal Names in Text",
    author = "Prabhakaran, Vinodkumar  and
      Mostafazadeh Davani, Aida  and
      Ferguson, Melissa  and
      Atir, Stav",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.425",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.425",
    pages = "6801--6809",
    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., \textit{John, would you turn the light off?} vs. \textit{John turned the light off}. While this distinction is marked by a \textit{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 \textit{address} vs. \textit{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.",
}

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., \textit{John, would you turn the light off?} vs. \textit{John turned the light off}. While this distinction is marked by a \textit{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 \textit{address} vs. \textit{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.
Prabhakaran, Vinodkumar Mostafazadeh Davani, Aida Ferguson, Melissa Atir, Stav
Distinguishing Address vs. Reference Mentions of Personal Names in Text