Generating Punctuation in Written Arguments

The generation of punctuation (including formatting) in written text has not been explored extensively, despite general acknowledgment that punctuation is crucial not just for rare cases of disambiguation, but more generally for ease of comprehension and thus for the ultimate effectiveness of a text. A framework for the generation of natural language argument is summarized, and is then shown to be suited to the generation of a number of forms of punctuation which have not be adequately accounted for in previous work. In particular, it is proposed that chapter, section and paragraph breaks, footnotes, and quotations require an abstract, intention-laden representation for their adequate generation. Finally, it is demonstrated that explicit handling of focus shift operators can facilitate the generation of punctuation in general, and that the distinction between structural and rhetorical facets of text provides a means of accounting for context-specific punctuation.