Word, named entity and stipulative definitions

Krzysztof Bogacki

Uniwersytet Warszawski

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore difficulties in defining the term ’word’. They stem from the fact that the existing definitions are descriptive, which means that they take into account a very long list of contexts – linguistic and others – and a variety of languages where this term has been used. None of the definitions considered corresponds to the totality of uses of this term. On the contrary, the term ‘named entity’, recently introduced by a stipulative definition, is the one in which this new term is given a specific meaning in a given context. It is neither “correct” nor “incorrect”. It was created in such a way that it can be useful for its intended purposes such as getting simple structured information out of unstructured (or loosely formatted) text, question answering, classifying information, automatic (or semi-automatic) text summarization, indexing, annotation etc.

Keywords:

named entity, word, descriptive definition, stipulative definition