While it has been widely assumed that punctuation may play a critical role in parsing, there has been relatively little direct empirical investigation of its effects. Most researchers have either avoided the use of punctuation or have simply assumed that it will serve a disambiguating role. There has been little or no consideration of how ’disambiguation’ might occur or whether it is equally ef...

A FUNCTION returns a value from a computation or system manipulation that requires zero or more arguments. And, like most programming languages, the SAS System provides an extensive library of “built-in” functions. SAS has more than 190 functions for a variety of programming tasks. This tutorial will cover the syntax for invoking functions, an overview of the functions available, examples of co...

Motivating high school students to consider Computer Science as their future field of study at the university level is a challenging endeavor. This paper describes the McGill Computer Science Summer Camp targeted at high school students from grade 10 to 11 (ages 15 to 17). We first motivate our choice of using computer games as the main camp theme, and then present the teaching methodology used...

A production experiment was carried out, in order to investigate text punctuation, including standard as well as ungrammatical (communicative) punctuation marks, and prosody relations. It is shown that punctuation is directly related to the duration of pauses, leading to the following structure: question mark>exclamation mark>full stop> colon>comma> ellipsis. Pitch resetting occurs in all cases...

Discourse relation is an important content of discourse semantic analysis, and the study of punctuation is of importance for discourse relation. In this paper, we propose a method of Chinese comma classification based on maximum entropy (ME). This method classifies the sentence relation based on comma with ME by extracting rich linguistic features before and after the commas in sentences. Exper...