multi paragraph segmentation expository text

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.cmp-lg/9406037
• Publication Date: 1994-01-01
• Authors: Marti A. Hearst
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Computation and Language; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology; Computation and Language (cs.CL)

This paper describes TextTiling, an algorithm for partitioning expository texts into coherent multi-paragraph discourse units which reflect the subtopic structure of the texts. The algorithm uses domain-independent lexical frequency and distribution information to recognize the interactions of multiple simultaneous themes. Two fully-implemented versions of the algorithm are described and shown to produce segmentation that corresponds well to human judgments of the major subtopic boundaries of thirteen lengthy texts.<br/>To Appear in ACL '94 Proceedings; 8 pages POSTSCRIPT format<br/>