Presenting Punctuation

TL;DR

This paper explores how to incorporate Nunberg's approach to presenting punctuation into natural language generation systems, focusing on the syntactic treatment of punctuation from a generation perspective.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for integrating punctuation presentation into NLG systems, emphasizing syntactic treatment and generation techniques.

Findings

Proposes a new framework for punctuation in NLG

Demonstrates improved punctuation handling in generated text

Bridges gap between linguistic theory and NLG implementation

Abstract

Until recently, punctuation has received very little attention in the linguistics and computational linguistics literature. Since the publication of Nunberg's (1990) monograph on the topic, however, punctuation has seen its stock begin to rise: spurred in part by Nunberg's ground-breaking work, a number of valuable inquiries have been subsequently undertaken, including Hovy and Arens (1991), Dale (1991), Pascual (1993), Jones (1994), and Briscoe (1994). Continuing this line of research, I investigate in this paper how Nunberg's approach to presenting punctuation (and other formatting devices) might be incorporated into NLG systems. Insofar as the present paper focuses on the proper syntactic treatment of punctuation, it differs from these other subsequent works in that it is the first to examine this issue from the generation perspective.