Recovering Punctuations in Instant Messages - Towards the prosody norm in IM

Instant Messaging (IM) is being increasingly adopted in the workplace and personal life. Prosody can enhance users’ interaction with IM. Punctuation is one type of indicators of prosody in text. However, instant messages are characterized by absent punctuations, among others. Moreover, the empirical study on punctuations in IM is sparse. Therefore, we aim to recover punctuations in instant messages. In this study, we develop a heuristic approach to automatically recovering punctuations in IM. The empirical results of the approach are very encouraging. The findings of this study have a number of implications. They shed light on the patterns of missing punctuations in instant messages and the importance of proper punctuation usage to achieving effective communication. This study is the first effort toward creating the prosody norm in IM interaction.