Linda Stark

The use of commas in German is an orthographic area in which deviations from the official standard and variants are frequently observed. They correspond to a pronounced uncertainty among human writers, which seems mostly to be due to the limited applicability of static grammatical knowledge. Since the application of grammatical knowledge is largely required to look up comma rules and put them into practice in an individual text, uncertain writers often lack help with their comma questions. For this problem, Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be a solution, as numerous freely available AI-based applications on the internet promise to correct punctuation in free written texts. This article presents an empirical study with 10 open-source AI (correction) tools: On the basis of a text with 386 comma positions it examines the extent to which these AI tools deliver on the promise of standard-compliant comma placement. By systemizing the observable deviations from the official standard, it is argued that the inves-tigated tools adhere – as well as humans do – to lexical text criteria when placing commas. This lexical view on comma placement helps explain why AI outperforms humans in some comma domains and underperforms in others. mehr