  Few, if any, current NLP systems make any significant use of punctuation.
Intuitively, a treatment of punctuation seems necessary to the analysis and
production of text. Whilst this has been suggested in the fields of discourse
structure, it is still unclear whether punctuation can help in the syntactic
field. This investigation attempts to answer this question by parsing some
corpus-based material with two similar grammars --- one including rules for
punctuation, the other ignoring it. The punctuated grammar significantly
out-performs the unpunctuated one, and so the conclusion is that punctuation
can play a useful role in syntactic processing.
