Detecting Commas in Slovak Legal Texts

This paper reports on initial experiments with automatic comma recovery in legal texts. In deciding whether to insert a comma or not, we propose to use the value of the probability of a bigram of two words without a comma and a trigram of the words with the comma. The probability is determined by the language model trained on sentences with commas labeled as separate words. In the training database one sentence corresponds to one line. The thresholds of bigrams and trigrams probability were experimentally determined to achieve the best balance of precision and recall. The advantage of the proposed method is its high precision (95%) at a relatively satisfactory recall (49%). For judges as potential users of an ASR system with an automatic comma insertion function, precision is particularly important.