Discursive Usage of Six Chinese Punctuation Marks

Both rhetorical structure and punctuation have been helpful in discourse processing. Based on a corpus annotation project, this paper reports the discursive usage of 6 Chinese punctuation marks in news commentary texts: Colon, Dash, Ellipsis, Exclamation Mark, Question Mark, and Semicolon. The rhetorical patterns of these marks are compared against patterns around cue phrases in general. Results show that these Chinese punctuation marks, though fewer in number than cue phrases, are easy to identify, have strong correlation with certain relations, and can be used as distinctive indicators of nuclearity in Chinese texts.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Ming Yue
• Keywords: ACL 2006, ACL 2007, Chinese Punctuation Marks, Corpus Annotation Project, Cue Phrases