A More Precise Analysis of Punctuation for Broad-Coverage Surface Realization with CCG

This paper describes a more precise analysis of punctuation for a bi-directional, broad coverage English grammar extracted from the CCGbank (Hockenmaier and Steedman, 2007). We discuss various approaches which have been proposed in the literature to constrain overgeneration with punctuation, and illustrate how aspects of Briscoe’s (1994) influential approach, which relies on syntactic features to constrain the appearance of balanced and unbalanced commas and dashes to appropriate sentential contexts, is unattractive for CCG. As an interim solution to constrain overgeneration, we propose a rule-based filter which bars illicit sequences of punctuation and cases of improperly unbalanced apposition. Using the OpenCCG toolkit, we demonstrate that our punctuation-augmented grammar yields substantial increases in surface realization coverage and quality, helping to achieve state-of-the-art BLEU scores.