[Corpora-List] Encoding of apostrophes and quotes

[John F. Sowa]

All this variability in how people use apostrophes and
punctuation of any kind proves one very important point:
no matter how systematic, expressive, and logical any
system of encoding or tagging may be, people are going
to do whatever they damn well please.

Anybody who has ever tried to parse ordinary NL prose --
even supposedly well-edited prose -- knows that punctuation
is highly unreliable.  It's useful to consider it, but
only as one among many possibly contradictory sources of
information about the structure of a text.

Tagging a text correctly (according to some set of rules)
is harder than punctuating it correctly.  If people aren't
very good at punctuation, I seriously doubt that they'll
be any better at tagging.

John Sowa