We present an explicit construction of a compactification of the locus of smooth curves whose symmetric Weierstrass semigroup at a marked point is odd. The construction is an extension of Stoehr's techniques using Pinkham's equivariant deformation of monomial curves by exploring syzygies. As an application we prove the rationality of the locus for genus at most six.

We provide a new lower bound for the dimension of the moduli space of smooth pointed curves with prescribed Weierstrass semigroup at the marked point, derived from the Deligne-Greuel formula and Pinkham's equivariant deformation theory. Using Buchweitz's description of the first cohomology module of the cotangent complex for monomial curves, we show that our lower bound improves a recently one given by Pflueger. By allowing semigroups running over suitable families of symmetric semigroups of multiplicity six, we show that this new lower bound is attained, and that the corresponding moduli spaces are non-empty and of pure dimension.

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