Syntactically-informed models for comma prediction

Providing punctuation in speech transcripts not only improves readability, but it also helps downstream text processing such as information extraction or machine translation. In this paper, we improve by 7% the accuracy of comma prediction in English broadcast news by introducing syntactic features inspired by the role of commas as described in linguistics studies. We conduct an analysis of the impact of those features on other subsets of features (prosody, words...) when combined through CRFs. The syntactic cues can help characterizing large syntactic patterns such as appositions and lists which are not necessarily marked by prosody.