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The lexical reader has been modified to allow the PUNDIT Natural Language Processing system to recognize abbreviations ending in periods. PUNDIT previously had not been able to distinguish between periods ending abbreviations and periods ending sentences; consequently, it was not able to parse sentences with internal punctuation. Several meetings have been held to identify a discrete yet useful arena for developing a more flexible control strategy in syntactic and semantic processing of text. Currently, Pundit's control mechanism flows from the syntactic module. (Semantic data is used as a filter on the syntax, via the recently implemented selectional component, but this filtering does not change the control structure). The meetings have focused on the distribution of lexical information, which is dispersed both in the lexicon used by the syntactic parser and in the semantic lexical entries with their associated syntactic mapping rules. One proposal that has emerged would exploit the semantic component's potential to predict verb transitivity on the basis of selectional information and thereby handle the phenomenon of transitivity alternation, i.e., verbs which have transitive and intransitive uses. This would be useful because many verbs in English exhibit transitivity alternations.