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Can punctuation help learning?

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Connectionist, Statistical and Symbolic Approaches to Learning for Natural Language Processing (IJCAI 1995)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1040))

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Abstract

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 briefly considering the linguistics of punctuation, a model capturing some of these properties is presented. Following this, a series of experiments learning unification-based natural language grammars, using the Spoken English Corpus as data, demonstrate that even a simple model of punctuation increases the plausibility of learnt grammars over grammars learnt without the use of punctuation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of York, YO1 5DD, Heslington, York, UK

    Miles Osborne

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  1. Miles Osborne
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Editor information

Stefan Wermter Ellen Riloff Gabriele Scheler

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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Osborne, M. (1996). Can punctuation help learning?. In: Wermter, S., Riloff, E., Scheler, G. (eds) Connectionist, Statistical and Symbolic Approaches to Learning for Natural Language Processing. IJCAI 1995. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1040. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60925-3_62

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60925-3_62

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-60925-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49738-7

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