Multi-paragraph segmentation of expository text

  • Authors:
  • Marti A. Hearst

  • Affiliations:
  • University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

  • Venue:
  • ACL '94 Proceedings of the 32nd annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 1994

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Abstract

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.