Applying Templates to a Substring

If I have a <li> node like this:

<ol>
     <li>1) This is the <b>first</b> item.</li>
     <li>2) This is the 2<sup>nd</sup> item.</li>
</ol>

and I want the output to be:

<ol>
     <li>This is the <b>first</b> item.</li>
     <li>This is the 2<sup>nd</sup> item.</li>
</ol>

However I'm not aware of how you can apply-templates to a substring. The only 
way I can get the proper substring I need that I know of is:

<xsl:value-of select="substring-after(.,')')"/>

but that yields

<li>This is the first item.</li>
<li>This is the 2nd item.</li>

without the inner tags.


Thanks