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Glossaries and Concepts

Glossaries and Concepts are how Mention organizes and delivers knowledge about key terms and ideas. A Glossary is the container; Concepts are the items inside it; Articles are the learning materials generated from them.

Glossaries

A Glossary is an ordered collection of Concepts scoped to a single Audience. Every Audience has exactly one Glossary. It captures:

  • Which concepts the Audience's members need to learn — admins choose these
  • In what order members should learn them — Mention works this out
  • What dependencies exist between concepts (prerequisites) — Mention works these out too

Admins populate a Glossary by reviewing concept candidates that Mention extracts from ingested content, and optionally writing in new concepts. Each concept's definition, its position in the learning order, and its prerequisite links are generated by Mention during the glossary build, which re-runs whenever the concept set changes or new sources are activated.

A Glossary holds at most 20 concepts. The cap keeps the learning path focused — pick the concepts that matter most for the Audience.

Concepts

A Concept is a key term, idea, or piece of domain-specific knowledge extracted from your documents. For example, if your team's documentation frequently references "CI/CD Pipeline," "Sprint Planning," or "Service Level Agreement," Mention identifies these as concepts.

How concepts are identified

When you activate documents from your content sources, Mention analyzes them to find terms that appear across multiple documents. A term needs to be mentioned at least 5 times across your activated assets to appear as a candidate for your review.

The concept lifecycle

  1. Extraction — Mention identifies terms across your ingested documents
  2. Candidacy — Terms that pass the mention threshold appear as candidates in the Glossary tab's search bar
  3. Review — You add candidates to the Glossary or skip them. You can also write in a new concept — though it still has to appear enough times in your sources for Mention to define and teach it
  4. Building — Mention generates each concept's definition, arranges concepts into a learning sequence, and works out the prerequisite links
  5. Learning — When a member accesses a concept, Mention generates a personalized Article

Dependencies

Concepts can have dependencies on other concepts. If Concept B depends on Concept A, a member accessing Concept B sees a prerequisite notice listing what they should master first. Members can choose to proceed anyway if they prefer.

Mention derives these prerequisite links during the glossary build so that they form a directed acyclic graph — there are no circular prerequisite chains, which guarantees there is always a valid learning order.

Articles

An Article is an AI-generated learning document for a specific Concept. Articles are personalized — generated for each member when they first access the concept.

Structure

Each Article is divided into sections, with each section covering a specific aspect of the concept. The content is grounded in your organization's source material, ensuring accuracy and relevance.

Knowledge checks

Every section ends with a Knowledge Check — a short multiple-choice quiz. The member must answer all of its questions correctly to pass the section; passing every section's check marks the concept complete.

Generation

Articles are generated on demand — the first time a member opens a concept, Mention creates the article using context from the concept's source documents and the Glossary's definitions. A brief loading state appears while the article is being generated, then it's cached and loads instantly afterward. A daily job refreshes articles whose source material has shifted meaningfully, and a member can regenerate their own article (which resets their progress on that concept) — both consume credits.

When an Article mentions another Concept that exists in the same Glossary, Mention turns the mention into a link to that Concept's Article. This wiki-style linking lets members jump from one Concept to a related one without searching. Links are created automatically — admins do not configure them.