Quoted speech is often set off by punctuation marks, in particular quotation marks. Thus, it might seem that the quotation marks would be extremely useful in identifying these structures in texts. Unfortunately, the situation is not quite so clear. In this work, I will argue that quotation marks are not adequate for either identifying or constraining the syntax of quoted speech. More useful inf...

We present a new approach to aligning English and Chinese sentences in parallel corpora based solely on punctuations. Although the length based approach produces high accuracy rates of sentence alignment for clean parallel corpora written in two Western languages such as French-English and German-English, it does not fair as well for parallel corpora that are noisy or written in two distant lan...

Companies today have to adopt strategies that embrace both a closer reaction to the customers’ needs and efficiency. Mass customisation meets this challenge by offering individually customised goods and services with mass production efficiency. According to a number of recent surveys, there is evidence for the increasing importance of this strategy in various industries. But what do the custome...

This paper describes a rule-based approach to segment Arabic texts into clauses. Our method relies on an extensive analysis of a large set of lexical cues as well as punctuation marks. Our analysis was carried out on two different corpus genres: news articles and elementary school textbooks. We propose a three steps segmentation algorithm: first by using only punctuation marks, then by relying ...

Automatic speech transcripts can be made more readable and useful for further processing by enriching them with punctuation marks and other meta-linguistic information. We study in this work how to improve automatic recovery of one of the most difficult punctuation marks, commas, in French and in Czech. We show that commas detection performances are largely improved in both languages by integra...