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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 if it appears at least 5 times across your activated sources
  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 is added to the Audience, Mention generates a personalized Article for each concept, ready by the time they open it

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 and orders concepts so that prerequisites come first, giving members a clear learning path.

Concept clusters

Sometimes a few concepts are genuinely defined in terms of one another — they reference each other, so no single one can be called the prerequisite of the others. Mention groups these into a cluster: a small set of mutually-referential concepts with no internal order. A cluster unlocks as a unit once everything it depends on is mastered, and members learn its concepts together rather than one strictly before another. Most concepts aren't clustered; clusters appear only when the underlying material is inherently interlinked.

Articles

An Article is an AI-generated learning document for a specific Concept. Articles are personalized — generated for each member when they're added to the Audience.

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.

Article prose can embed interactive widgets — steppers, flip cards, decision helpers, tabbed views, timelines, and small flow diagrams — when interaction genuinely aids learning, plus standard tables. Widgets reinforce the prose rather than replace it, and a client that can't render a widget shows a labeled placeholder card instead. A widget being added, removed, or materially changed counts as a substantial change during regeneration, so learners re-engage with the updated material.

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 when a member is added to the Audience — Mention writes one per concept using context from the concept's source documents and the Glossary's definitions, so they're normally ready by the time the member opens them. When a concept is later added to an Audience that already has members, Mention generates that concept's article for each of them as well; removing a concept deletes their copies. If a concept is opened before its article has finished, a brief loading state appears, 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.