diff --git a/nltk/test/tokenize.doctest b/nltk/test/tokenize.doctest
index 16979c5a8b..81ebb3b349 100644
--- a/nltk/test/tokenize.doctest
+++ b/nltk/test/tokenize.doctest
@@ -40,6 +40,19 @@ Some test strings.
     >>> word_tokenize(s10)
     ['There', 'were', '300,000', ',', 'but', 'that', 'was', "n't", 'enough', '.']
 
+
+Testing improvement made to the TreebankWordTokenizer
+
+    >>> sx1 = u'\xabNow that I can do.\xbb'
+    >>> expected = [u'\xab', u'Now', u'that', u'I', u'can', u'do', u'.', u'\xbb']
+    >>> word_tokenize(sx1) == expected
+    True
+    >>> sx2 = u'The unicode 201C and 201D \u201cLEFT(RIGHT) DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK\u201d is also OPEN_PUNCT and CLOSE_PUNCT.'
+    >>> expected = [u'The', u'unicode', u'201C', u'and', u'201D', u'\u201c', u'LEFT', u'(', u'RIGHT', u')', u'DOUBLE', u'QUOTATION', u'MARK', u'\u201d', u'is', u'also', u'OPEN_PUNCT', u'and', u'CLOSE_PUNCT', u'.']
+    >>> word_tokenize(sx2) == expected
+    True
+
+
 Sentence tokenization in word_tokenize:
 
     >>> s11 = "I called Dr. Jones. I called Dr. Jones."
diff --git a/nltk/tokenize/__init__.py b/nltk/tokenize/__init__.py
index 3eed916179..5503ff6de1 100644
--- a/nltk/tokenize/__init__.py
+++ b/nltk/tokenize/__init__.py
@@ -4,6 +4,7 @@
 # Copyright (C) 2001-2017 NLTK Project
 # Author: Edward Loper <edloper@gmail.com>
 #         Steven Bird <stevenbird1@gmail.com> (minor additions)
+# Contributors: matthewmc, clouds56
 # URL: <http://nltk.org/>
 # For license information, see LICENSE.TXT
 
@@ -59,6 +60,8 @@
 For further information, please see Chapter 3 of the NLTK book.
 """
 
+import re
+
 from nltk.data              import load
 from nltk.tokenize.casual   import (TweetTokenizer, casual_tokenize)
 from nltk.tokenize.mwe      import MWETokenizer
@@ -94,12 +97,26 @@ def sent_tokenize(text, language='english'):
     return tokenizer.tokenize(text)
 
 # Standard word tokenizer.
-_treebank_word_tokenize = TreebankWordTokenizer().tokenize
+_treebank_word_tokenizer = TreebankWordTokenizer()
+
+# See discussion on https://github.com/nltk/nltk/pull/1437
+# Adding to TreebankWordTokenizer, the splits on
+# - chervon quotes u'\xab' and u'\xbb' .
+# - unicode quotes u'\u2018', u'\u2019', u'\u201c' and u'\u201d'
+
+improved_open_quote_regex = re.compile(u'([«“‘])', re.U)
+improved_close_quote_regex = re.compile(u'([»”’])', re.U)
+improved_punct_regex = re.compile(r'([^\.])(\.)([\]\)}>"\'' u'»”’' r']*)\s*$', re.U)
+_treebank_word_tokenizer.STARTING_QUOTES.insert(0, (improved_open_quote_regex, r' \1 '))
+_treebank_word_tokenizer.ENDING_QUOTES.insert(0, (improved_close_quote_regex, r' \1 '))
+_treebank_word_tokenizer.PUNCTUATION.insert(0, (improved_punct_regex, r'\1 \2 \3 '))
+
+
 def word_tokenize(text, language='english'):
     """
     Return a tokenized copy of *text*,
     using NLTK's recommended word tokenizer
-    (currently :class:`.TreebankWordTokenizer`
+    (currently an improved :class:`.TreebankWordTokenizer`
     along with :class:`.PunktSentenceTokenizer`
     for the specified language).
 
@@ -107,5 +124,4 @@ def word_tokenize(text, language='english'):
     :param language: the model name in the Punkt corpus
     """
     return [token for sent in sent_tokenize(text, language)
-            for token in _treebank_word_tokenize(sent)]
-
+            for token in _treebank_word_tokenizer.tokenize(sent)]
diff --git a/nltk/tokenize/treebank.py b/nltk/tokenize/treebank.py
index 3f960d4fa5..83ad2c3a2d 100644
--- a/nltk/tokenize/treebank.py
+++ b/nltk/tokenize/treebank.py
@@ -93,7 +93,7 @@ class TreebankWordTokenizer(TokenizerI):
     CONTRACTIONS4 = [re.compile(r"(?i)\b(whad)(dd)(ya)\b"),
                      re.compile(r"(?i)\b(wha)(t)(cha)\b")]
 
-    def tokenize(self, text):
+    def tokenize(self, text, return_str=False):
         for regexp, substitution in self.STARTING_QUOTES:
             text = regexp.sub(substitution, text)
 
@@ -119,6 +119,4 @@ def tokenize(self, text):
         # for regexp in self.CONTRACTIONS4:
         #     text = regexp.sub(r' \1 \2 \3 ', text)
 
-        return text.split()
-
-
+        return text if return_str else text.split()