Tokens in Kestrel need not correspond to whitespace-delimited tokens, even in those languages where whitespace or punctuation is used to separate words.
the Kestrel grammars recognize Jan.1, 2012 as a date and parse it as a single token, identifying the month, day, and year, and represent it internally using a protocol-buffer representation like the following: 6 date { month: "January" day: "1" year: "2012"} Verbalization grammars then convert from a serialization of the protocol buffer representation into actual word sequences, such as January the first twenty twelve.