punkt

Punkt is a German noun with several related meanings in everyday language. It most commonly denotes a point or dot, and in writing it is used to name the period that ends a sentence (der Punkt). In numerical notation, Punkt is also the term used for the decimal point in contexts where the dot is read as a decimal separator, even though German typically uses a comma for decimals. The word also denotes a geometric point or position in space, and it can appear in lists or outlines to mark items, as in Punkt 1, Punkt 2.

In linguistics and natural language processing, Punkt refers to a well-known algorithm for sentence boundary detection. The Punkt approach is language-agnostic and operates in an unsupervised fashion, designed to work without manually labeled training data. It became influential for projects requiring robust sentence segmentation across multiple languages. Implementations of Punkt models are included in several NLP libraries, most notably as the PunktSentenceTokenizer in the NLTK toolkit, where they are used to split text into sentences while attempting to handle punctuation, abbreviations, and other edge cases. The method emphasizes cross-language applicability and has been used as a practical tool in multilingual text processing, as well as a reference point in discussions of rule-based versus data-driven approaches to tokenization.