An Analysis of English Punctuation
The Special Case of Comma
Murat Bayraktar | Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey
Bilge Say | Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey
Varol Akman | Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey
Punctuation has usually been ignored by researchers in computational linguistics over the years. Recently, it has been realized that a true understanding of written language will be impossible if punctuation marks are not taken into account. This paper contains the details of a computer-aided exercise to investigate English punctuation practice for the special case of comma (the most significant punctuation mark) in a parsed corpus. The study classifies the various "structural" uses of the comma according to the syntax-patterns in which a comma occurs. The corpus (Penn Treebank) consists of syntactically annotated sentences with no part-of-speech tag information about the individual words.
Keywords: Comma, Structural Punctuation Marks, The Penn Treebank, Punctuation
Published online: 01 January 1998
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.3.1.03bay
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.3.1.03bay
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