Information-Based Aspects of Punctuation
Bilge Say, Varol Akman · CogPrints (University of Southampton) · 1996
We offer a preliminary account of the information-based aspects of punctuation marks. We give our initial treatment within the Discourse Representation Theory and its segmented version. We hypothesize that this work will be useful in classifying the informational contributions of punctuation marks and bringing them to bear on the semantic characterization of written discourse. 1 Introduction Recent linguistic works have attempted to produce systematic characterizations of punctuation marks descriptively. 1 Nunberg (1990) shows how punctuation is a linguistic system on its own and devises a "text-grammar" for this purpose using mechanisms of conventional, or "lexical" grammars. Based on his work, several researchers integrated punctuation marks into the NLP systems (Briscoe, 1994; Jones, 1994; White, 1995). We want to add on top of the previous work a formal characterization of the information that punctuation marks bring to the discourse, semantically and pragmatically, within or ab...