Categorization and Identification of Fragments with Shi Plus Punctuation

Studies on Chinese sentences with shi (ÊÇ) as predicate have been profoundly fruitful from the perspective of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. In a broader sense, however, a large number of sentences with shi functioning as other syntactic roles - adverb, conjunction, auxiliary and even interjection - are practically used, and stand as barriers to natural language processing (NLP) and machine translation (MT). The special fragments consisting of shi plus punctuation are divided into "shi plus comma" and "comma plus shi", which are examined and discussed with the instruments of corpora, illustrations and comparison. Two exceptional fragments are also briefed to improve the precision in computer identification of these shi-plus-punctuation fragments.