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<Paper uid="C96-2102">
  <Title>Towards a Syntactic Account of Punctuation</Title>
  <Section position="9" start_page="608" end_page="608" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We have seen that by extracting punctuation patterns from a corpus it has been possible to postulate a small number of generalisations for punctuation rules within NL grammars. A suitable methodology for applying tmnctuation to existing grammars has also been suggested. Since many of the rule patterns seem to have a w'xy low frequency of occurrence it may also be useflfl to collect such frequencies and use them in the rule generalisations to attach probabilities to various rule expansions. We have also seen that the rule patterns we extracted fi'om the corpora agreed to a large extent with the descriptions of punctuation use found in publishers' style-guides, suggesting thai; reference to these may be usefnl.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> What is needed now is a thorough testing and evaluation of the suggestions made in this paper, both against lmnctuation patterns from other corpora and in parsing novel material, to maybe suggest better geimralisations. 'Fheu the next step towards a theory of punctuation can be carried out, namely the analysis of punctuation for its semantic flmction and content.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> My regards to the international academic and research comnmnity in the field of Computational Linguistics: thank-you, and good-bye!</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>