The Earliest Punctuation

Presenting Punctuation

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), Da...

The earliest knockouts.

Can punctuation help learning?

The quality of learnt natural language grammars can be enhanced by exploiting the linguistic devices that comprise a corpus. This paper considers one such device, namely punctuation. After brieey considering the linguistics of punctuation, a model capturing some of these properties is presented. Following this, a series of experiments learning uniication-based natural language grammars, using t...

Punctuation in Quoted Speech

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...

Chromatin-based transcriptional punctuation.

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...