Ensuring proper punctuation and letter casing is a key pre-processing step towards applying complex natural language processing algorithms. This especially significant for textual sources where are missing, such as the raw output of automatic speech recognition systems. Additionally, short text messages micro-blogging platforms offer unreliable often wrong casing. survey offers an overview both...

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...

The writing of three attainment groups 10- to 11-year-old children was used investigate their use ludic (playful) punctuation in the composition an advertisement for a new dessert. Framed within consideration language play general, and children’s particular, investigation revealed ways which primary playful order achieve persuasive aims. There were clear differences between both content range t...

The long polycistronic transcription units of trypanosomes do not appear to be demarcated by the usual DNA motifs that punctuate transcription in familiar eukaryotes. In this issue of Genes & Development, Siegel and colleagues (pp. 1063-1076) describe a system for the demarcation of trypanosome transcription units based on the deposition and turnover of histone variants rather than on the bindi...

This paper reports on the beginnings of some work whose aim is to investigate the role of punctuation in signalling discourse structure. This is part of a larger enterprise motivated by the view that natural language processing systems, whether generating or understanding language, should take account of the physical manifestation of language: in the context of written language, this means taki...

The sentence is a standard textual unit in natural language processing applications. In many languages the punctuation mark that indicates the end-of-sentence boundary is ambiguous; thus the tokenizers of most NLP systems must be equipped with special sentence-boundary recognition rules for every new text collection. As an alternative, this article presents an efficient, trainable system for se...

A statistical physics study of punctuation effects on sentence lengths is presented for written texts: Alice in wonderland and Through a looking glass. The translation of the first text into esperanto is also considered as a test for the role of punctuation in defining a style, and for contrasting natural and artificial, but written, languages. Several log-log plots of the sentence length-rank ...