Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Several studies have indicated that NLP could benefit from the inclusion of a treatment of punctuation. The main impediment to the construction of any such implementation is that there no theory of punctuation upon which to base it. More basically, little is currently known about just what punctuation marks exist, how much they are used, and how they interact with each other This study aims to answer these basic questions through the analysis of a very large corpus, and some suggestions are made for the formulation of a theory of punctuation.