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Text segmentation
Text segmentation
Text segmentation
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Text segmentation is the process of dividing written text into meaningful units, such as words, sentences, or topics. The term applies both to mental processes used by humans when reading text, and to artificial processes implemented in computers, which are the subject of natural language processing. The problem is non-trivial, because while some written languages have explicit word boundary markers, such as the word spaces of written English and the distinctive initial, medial and final letter shapes of Arabic, such signals are sometimes ambiguous and not present in all written languages.

Compare speech segmentation, the process of dividing speech into linguistically meaningful portions.

Segmentation problems

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Word segmentation

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See also: Word § Word boundaries

Word segmentation is the problem of dividing a string of written language into its component words.

In English and many other languages using some form of the Latin alphabet, the space is a good approximation of a word divider (word delimiter), although this concept has limits because of the variability with which languages emically regard collocations and compounds. Many English compound nouns are variably written (for example, ice box = ice-box = icebox; pig sty = pig-sty = pigsty) with a corresponding variation in whether speakers think of them as noun phrases or single nouns; there are trends in how norms are set, such as that open compounds often tend eventually to solidify by widespread convention, but variation remains systemic. In contrast, German compound nouns show less orthographic variation, with solidification being a stronger norm.

However, the equivalent to the word space character is not found in all written scripts, and without it word segmentation is a difficult problem. Languages which do not have a trivial word segmentation process include Chinese, Japanese, where sentences but not words are delimited, Thai and Lao, where phrases and sentences but not words are delimited, and Vietnamese, where syllables but not words are delimited.

In some writing systems however, such as the Ge'ez script used for Amharic and Tigrinya among other languages, words are explicitly delimited (at least historically) with a non-whitespace character.

The Unicode Consortium has published a Standard Annex on Text Segmentation,[1] exploring the issues of segmentation in multiscript texts.

Word splitting is the process of parsing concatenated text (i.e. text that contains no spaces or other word separators) to infer where word breaks exist.

Word splitting may also refer to the process of hyphenation.

Some scholars have suggested that modern Chinese should be written in word segmentation, with spaces between words like written English.[2] Because there are ambiguous texts where only the author knows the intended meaning. For example, "美国会不同意。" may mean "美国 会 不同意。" (The US will not agree.) or "美 国会 不同意。" (The US Congress does not agree). For more details, see Chinese word-segmented writing.

Intent segmentation

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Intent segmentation is the problem of dividing written words into keyphrases (2 or more group of words).

In English and all other languages the core intent or desire is identified and become the corner-stone of the keyphrase Intent segmentation. Core product/service, idea, action & or thought anchor the keyphrase.

"[All things are made of atoms]. [Little particles that move] [around in perpetual motion], [attracting each other] [when they are a little distance apart], [but repelling] [upon being squeezed] [into one another]."

Sentence segmentation

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See also: Sentence boundary disambiguation

Sentence segmentation is the problem of dividing a string of written language into its component sentences. In English and some other languages, using punctuation, particularly the full stop/period character is a reasonable approximation. However even in English this problem is not trivial due to the use of the full stop character for abbreviations, which may or may not also terminate a sentence. For example, Mr. is not its own sentence in "Mr. Smith went to the shops in Jones Street." When processing plain text, tables of abbreviations that contain periods can help prevent incorrect assignment of sentence boundaries.

As with word segmentation, not all written languages contain punctuation characters that are useful for approximating sentence boundaries.

Topic segmentation

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See also: Document classification

Topic analysis consists of two main tasks: topic identification and text segmentation. While the first is a simple classification of a specific text, the latter case implies that a document may contain multiple topics, and the task of computerized text segmentation may be to discover these topics automatically and segment the text accordingly. The topic boundaries may be apparent from section titles and paragraphs. In other cases, one needs to use techniques similar to those used in document classification.

Segmenting the text into topics or discourse turns might be useful in some natural processing tasks: it can improve information retrieval or speech recognition significantly (by indexing/recognizing documents more precisely or by giving the specific part of a document corresponding to the query as a result). It is also needed in topic detection and tracking systems and text summarizing problems.

Many different approaches have been tried:[3][4] e.g. HMM, lexical chains, passage similarity using word co-occurrence, clustering, topic modeling, etc.

It is quite an ambiguous task – people evaluating the text segmentation systems often differ in topic boundaries. Hence, text segment evaluation is also a challenging problem.

Other segmentation problems

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Processes may be required to segment text into segments besides mentioned, including morphemes (a task usually called morphological analysis) or paragraphs.

Automatic segmentation approaches

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Automatic segmentation is the problem in natural language processing of implementing a computer process to segment text.

When punctuation and similar clues are not consistently available, the segmentation task often requires fairly non-trivial techniques, such as statistical decision-making, large dictionaries, as well as consideration of syntactic and semantic constraints. Effective natural language processing systems and text segmentation tools usually operate on text in specific domains and sources. As an example, processing text used in medical records is a very different problem than processing news articles or real estate advertisements.

The process of developing text segmentation tools starts with collecting a large corpus of text in an application domain. There are two general approaches:

  • Manual analysis of text and writing custom software
  • Annotate the sample corpus with boundary information and use machine learning

Some text segmentation systems take advantage of any markup like HTML and know document formats like PDF to provide additional evidence for sentence and paragraph boundaries.

See also

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References

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Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Text segmentation

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from Grokipedia
Text segmentation is the task of splitting a given piece of text into smaller, meaningful units such as words, sentences, paragraphs, or topics, serving as a fundamental preprocessing step in (NLP). This process addresses the inherent in unstructured text by identifying boundaries based on linguistic cues, semantic coherence, and contextual relevance, enabling subsequent tasks like , , and . Text segmentation encompasses several key subtypes, each tailored to specific linguistic challenges. Word segmentation, essential for languages without explicit word boundaries like Chinese or Thai, involves disambiguating character sequences into discrete words using statistical models, neural networks, or rule-based methods. Sentence segmentation, or sentence boundary detection, partitions text into individual sentences by recognizing , , and syntactic patterns, often as the initial step in NLP pipelines. Topic segmentation, also known as linear text segmentation, detects shifts in topics within longer documents, focusing on coherence breaks to create thematically uniform segments. Historically, early approaches to text segmentation relied on rule-based and statistical techniques; for instance, the TextTiling algorithm introduced in used lexical overlap to identify subtopic passages in English text. Subsequent advancements incorporated unsupervised methods like topic modeling with (LDA) for semantic similarity and graph-based models leveraging word embeddings. In recent years, supervised models, including BiLSTMs and transformers like BERT, have dominated, achieving state-of-the-art performance by learning hierarchical representations of text coherence. Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT variants have further pushed boundaries, enabling zero-shot segmentation through prompt-based inference. Applications of text segmentation span diverse domains, enhancing text readability, search efficiency, and automated content generation. In , it supports paragraph-level indexing and query-focused summarization by isolating relevant segments. For processing, it aids in transcription and news story boundary detection, while in and , accurate word and sentence segmentation improves downstream accuracy in multilingual settings. metrics, such as P_k for in boundary detection and WindowDiff for segment similarity, remain standard for assessing segmentation quality across these uses.

Fundamentals

Definition and scope

Text segmentation is the task of dividing unstructured text into smaller, linguistically meaningful units, such as words, sentences, or topics, to facilitate subsequent in (NLP). This process transforms raw, continuous text streams into structured components that capture semantic or syntactic boundaries, serving as a foundational step for enabling machines to interpret human language effectively. Within NLP, text segmentation plays a crucial role in preprocessing pipelines for diverse applications, including —where precise unit identification ensures alignment across languages—, to enhance search relevance through better document chunking, and , by isolating opinion-bearing segments for targeted evaluation. Its importance lies in improving the accuracy and efficiency of downstream tasks like , summarization, and , where ill-defined units can propagate errors. Segmentation occurs at varying granularities to suit different analytical needs: character-level segmentation decomposes text into individual characters, which is particularly useful for subword modeling or scripts without clear delimiters; token-level (word) segmentation identifies lexical boundaries; sentence-level segmentation delineates complete thoughts using cues like ; and discourse-level segmentation partitions text into higher-order units, such as topical sections or elementary discourse units (EDUs), to reveal coherence structures. The challenges and approaches to segmentation differ across languages; for example, in space-separated scripts like English, word boundaries are easily inferred from whitespace, allowing simple splitting, whereas in non-space-separated languages like Chinese or Japanese, segmentation demands disambiguating continuous character sequences to infer meaningful words.

Historical context

The origins of text segmentation trace back to the early days of in the 1950s and , where rule-based tokenization emerged as a foundational preprocessing step in projects. The Georgetown-IBM experiment of 1954, a pioneering demonstration of Russian-to-English translation, relied on simple rule-based algorithms to parse and segment input text into basic units, handling a limited vocabulary of about 250 words through direct word-for-word substitution and rudimentary boundary detection. This approach highlighted the necessity of segmentation for handling structured linguistic input, though it was constrained by manual rules and lacked robustness for complex syntax. Subsequent efforts in the , amid growing interest in automated language processing, extended these rule-based methods to broader tokenization tasks in early systems. In the and , advancements in sentence boundary detection coincided with the expansion of , driven by the creation and annotation of large-scale text collections. The , compiled in 1961 and fully tagged by 1982, provided a million-word sample of that necessitated reliable methods to identify sentence endings, particularly for disambiguating abbreviations and like periods, which occur at sentence boundaries about 90% of the time in such corpora. Rule-based heuristics, informed by manual annotation of corpora like Brown, became standard for preprocessing in linguistic research and early systems, emphasizing the role of segmentation in enabling accurate and statistical analysis of text. The 1990s marked a shift toward statistical methods, particularly for word segmentation in languages without explicit word boundaries, such as Asian scripts. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) gained prominence for modeling sequence probabilities in Japanese text, achieving segmentation accuracies around 91% by treating word boundaries as hidden states inferred from character transitions and n-gram statistics. Concurrently, the TextTiling algorithm (1997) introduced lexical overlap measures for unsupervised topic segmentation in English texts. This probabilistic paradigm extended to sentence boundary disambiguation, as exemplified by Reynar and Ratnaparkhi's 1997 maximum entropy approach, which classified potential boundaries using contextual features from tagged corpora, outperforming prior rule-based systems on Wall Street Journal data. Uchimoto et al. (2001) advanced morphological analysis for Japanese spontaneous speech, integrating maximum entropy models with dictionaries to handle unknown words and segment text at 95% accuracy on held-out data. From the 2010s onward, text segmentation integrated with frameworks, evolving toward end-to-end neural architectures that bypassed traditional rule or statistical pipelines. Bidirectional LSTMs and CRFs enabled character-level modeling for word segmentation in Chinese and Japanese, improving F1 scores by 2-5% over HMM baselines on standard benchmarks like CTB and NLTK corpora. The advent of transformers in 2017 further revolutionized the field, allowing contextual embeddings for joint segmentation tasks, such as subword tokenization in models like BERT, which enhanced boundary detection in multilingual settings by leveraging self-attention mechanisms across sequences. Since around 2020, large language models (LLMs) such as GPT variants have enabled zero-shot segmentation through prompt-based inference. This neural shift emphasized unsupervised and , reducing reliance on handcrafted features while addressing challenges in noisy or low-resource texts.

Types of Segmentation

Word segmentation

Word segmentation involves dividing a continuous stream of text into individual words, a task that is straightforward in languages like English due to spaces but highly challenging in others without explicit delimiters. Languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and their texts without spaces between words, resulting in inherent ambiguities where multiple valid segmentations are possible for the same character sequence. For instance, in Chinese, the sequence "纽约" (Niǔ Yuē) unambiguously refers to "New York" as a compound word, but similar strings like "北京大学" could be parsed as " University" or fragmented differently depending on context, highlighting the need for disambiguation to preserve semantic integrity. To resolve these ambiguities, early approaches relied on dictionaries and contextual cues, such as matching substrings against a or using n-gram frequencies to favor probable word sequences. Rule-based methods, including maximum matching and longest matching algorithms, exemplify this: maximum matching (also known as forward or backward maximal matching) greedily selects the longest possible word from the current position and proceeds iteratively, while longest matching prioritizes extended compounds over shorter alternatives to minimize segmentation errors in dense scripts. These techniques, though simple and computationally efficient, struggle with out-of-vocabulary (OOV) terms like proper nouns or neologisms, often defaulting to character-level splits that degrade downstream analysis. Evaluation of word segmentation typically employs precision, , and F1-score at the word boundary level, with specialized metrics like OOV recall assessing performance on unseen words to gauge robustness against vocabulary gaps. High OOV recall is critical, as poor handling can propagate errors, yet seminal systems achieve around 90-95% F1 on standard benchmarks by integrating dictionary lookups with heuristic rules. In pipelines, accurate word segmentation forms the foundation of tokenization, enabling subsequent tasks such as by providing discrete lexical units rather than raw character streams.

Sentence segmentation

Sentence segmentation, also known as sentence boundary detection (SBD), is the process of dividing a text into individual sentences by identifying their start and end points, primarily using punctuation marks such as periods (.), question marks (?), and exclamation points (!). These markers serve as primary indicators of sentence endings in most written languages, but their interpretation requires careful disambiguation to avoid errors. For instance, a period may signal the end of a sentence or merely conclude an abbreviation, necessitating additional contextual analysis to determine the correct boundary. A key challenge in sentence segmentation lies in handling false positives from abbreviations and acronyms, such as "Dr.", "e.g.", or "U.S.A.", where the period does not denote a sentence break. Effective approaches distinguish these cases through predefined lists of common abbreviations combined with rules checking for subsequent , which typically signals the onset of a new sentence. Punctuation rules further guide the process, accounting for structural elements like , parentheses, and colons that may enclose or interrupt sentences without ending them; for example, within quotes often ends with a period inside but continues the enclosing sentence. Contextual features, including breaks and numerical sequences (e.g., in lists or dates), also inform boundary decisions to maintain syntactic integrity. In practice, rule-based systems exemplify these techniques, as seen in the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) library's Punkt sentence tokenizer for English, which employs heuristics to detect abbreviation patterns and applies rules prioritizing capitalization after potential boundaries. For the input "Dr. Smith visited Washington, D.C. yesterday.", it correctly identifies two sentences by recognizing "Dr." and "D.C." as non-boundary periods while treating the subsequent period as a true end marker. Such methods ensure robust segmentation in standard texts but face difficulties in informal genres like social media posts, where punctuation is often omitted or used emotively (e.g., multiple exclamation points), leading to under- or over-segmentation. Multilingual settings add complexity due to varying conventions, such as the Spanish use of inverted question marks or the absence of spaces after periods in some Asian scripts, while domain-specific corpora like legal documents introduce ambiguities from citations, footnotes, and enumerated clauses that mimic sentence structures. Accurate sentence segmentation is foundational for downstream tasks, particularly syntactic , where sentences form the basic input units for dependency or constituency analysis, and resolution, which relies on precise boundaries to link pronouns and entities across or within sentences without erroneous merging or splitting. Errors in segmentation can propagate, degrading performance in these areas. As a higher-level step, it builds on prior word-level preprocessing to operate on tokenized text streams.

Topic segmentation

Topic segmentation is a fundamental task in that involves detecting boundaries in a text where the thematic content shifts, thereby dividing documents or conversations into coherent segments that each address a single topic or subtopic. These segments typically span multiple sentences and are identified based on semantic coherence rather than syntactic units alone. Often relying on prior sentence segmentation to process texts at a granular level, topic segmentation facilitates higher-level analysis by creating topical units suitable for further processing. Key cues for detecting topic boundaries include lexical cohesion, where repeated keywords or semantically related terms indicate continuity within a segment, and shifts in rhetorical structure, such as the appearance of cue phrases (e.g., "in summary" or "on the other hand") that signal transitions between themes. Lexical cohesion draws from discourse theory, emphasizing how vocabulary overlap maintains thematic unity across sentences. Rhetorical shifts, meanwhile, reflect changes in argumentative or narrative flow, helping to pinpoint where a new discourse topic emerges. Challenges in topic segmentation arise particularly in long texts, where topic drifts can be gradual—evolving subtly through overlapping themes—rather than abrupt, complicating boundary detection and requiring models to capture nuanced semantic transitions. Gradual drifts demand sensitivity to evolving lexical patterns over extended passages, while abrupt changes might involve clear markers but risk over-segmentation if not balanced properly. A seminal example is the TextTiling algorithm, which divides text into multi-paragraph subtopic passages by computing between word frequency vectors from adjacent blocks, placing boundaries at points of low similarity to reflect lexical shifts. This approach has influenced subsequent methods by prioritizing quantitative measures of cohesion for segmentation. Applications include news article clustering, where segmenting stories by subtopics enables grouping similar content across s for improved retrieval and analysis, and meeting transcription, where identifying topic boundaries in multi-speaker dialogues supports summarization and action item extraction.

Intent and other specialized segmentation

Intent segmentation in conversational AI involves dividing dialogue utterances into coherent units based on user goals, such as distinguishing queries from confirmations or requests in chatbots. This process addresses multi-intent utterances where a single input expresses multiple objectives, enabling more accurate natural language understanding (NLU) by processing each segment separately. For instance, the utterance "The Zipcode is 48126.. was also looking for 4 tickets for batman vs movie" can be segmented into a slot-filling segment for and another for ticket booking, improving success from 50% to 77.5% in movie-ticket domains using neural segmentation models. In dialog systems, intent segmentation often integrates with slot-filling tasks, where utterances are segmented to extract structured information like dates or locations aligned with user intents. A segmentation-based treats slot filling as a generative modeling problem, jointly modeling non-slot parts tied to intents and slot values, which yields 0.5%–6.7% absolute gains in F1 scores over traditional sequence labeling on benchmarks like ATIS. Zero-shot approaches for rare intents further extend this by inducing slots without domain-specific training, using black-box to handle unseen goals in multi-turn interactions. Other specialized segmentation includes named entity segmentation, which identifies and extracts boundaries for entities like dates or locations within text streams. By incorporating (NER) and co-reference resolution, this method enhances topic boundary detection in both English and Greek texts, with benefits scaling to segment length and entity density, though gains vary by corpus. Paragraph segmentation, another variant, divides unstructured text into topical or structural units using cues like indentation or lexical cohesion, often challenged in noisy such as posts lacking clear breaks. BERT-based models augmented with probability density functions of segmentation distances achieve F1 scores of 0.8877 on diverse datasets, outperforming baselines by modeling variable lengths in raw text. Challenges in these tasks intensify in multi-turn dialogues, where intent evolution across exchanges leads to dynamic shifts, complicating boundary detection and consistency. Noisy environments, like social media, exacerbate errors due to informal language and incomplete contexts, requiring robust handling of ambiguities.

Automatic Segmentation Methods

Rule-based and heuristic approaches

Rule-based and heuristic approaches to text segmentation employ deterministic methods that rely on predefined linguistic rules, patterns, and scoring mechanisms to divide text into meaningful units without requiring training data. These techniques are foundational in (NLP), particularly for tasks like tokenization and sentence boundary detection, where explicit rules handle common patterns such as and whitespace. In sentence segmentation, rule-based systems often use regular expressions (regex) and linguistic heuristics to identify boundaries, with special attention to abbreviations that might mimic sentence-ending punctuation. For instance, tools like PySBD apply a set of hand-crafted rules, including abbreviation lists for 22 languages, to replace potential false positives with placeholders before applying regex for splitting, achieving high accuracy on benchmark datasets. Dictionaries of common s, such as "Dr." or "etc.", prevent erroneous breaks by prioritizing contextual rules over simple matching. For word segmentation, especially in languages without clear word boundaries like Chinese or morphologically rich languages such as Thai and , heuristics like the longest-match algorithm select the longest entry that fits the input from left to right, backtracking if necessary to ensure complete coverage. This approach addresses challenges in morphologically rich languages, where compound words and affixes complicate delimitation, by favoring maximal matches to minimize segmentation errors. Topic segmentation employs heuristics based on scoring mechanisms, such as keyword overlap or lexical chain cohesion, to detect shifts in . One such method builds lexical chains—sequences of related words via repetition, , or semantic relations from resources like —and scores segment boundaries by measuring of chain frequencies across sliding windows, identifying minima as potential topic breaks. Prominent examples include the Penn Treebank tokenizer, which applies a fixed set of rules to split English text, normalizing punctuation (e.g., converting parentheses to -LRB- and -RRB-) and handling contractions via regex patterns for consistent output. Early NLP tools, such as initial versions of , utilized rule-based tokenizers relying on language-specific regex for prefixes, infixes, and suffixes, enabling fast processing without neural models. These approaches offer advantages in interpretability, as rules are explicit and human-readable, and require no annotated training data, making them suitable for low-resource settings or rapid prototyping. However, they suffer from poor generalization to new domains or unseen linguistic variations, as manual rule crafting limits adaptability and can lead to brittleness in handling exceptions.

Statistical and probabilistic methods

Statistical and probabilistic methods for text segmentation employ data-driven models to estimate the likelihood of boundaries based on patterns observed in large corpora, providing a flexible alternative to rigid rule-based systems by accounting for contextual uncertainties through probability distributions. These approaches treat segmentation as a sequence labeling problem, where the goal is to assign labels (e.g., boundary or non-boundary) to positions in the text while maximizing the joint probability of the observed sequence and the labels. By training on annotated data, they learn transition probabilities between states and emission probabilities for observations, enabling over possible segmentations. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) form a foundational probabilistic framework for both word and sentence segmentation, modeling the text as a Markov chain of hidden states representing boundary decisions, with observable emissions as characters or tokens. In word segmentation, particularly for languages without spaces like Japanese, HMMs define states for word interiors and boundaries, using transition probabilities to capture likely word lengths and emission probabilities to match dictionary entries or character patterns; the Viterbi algorithm then efficiently decodes the most probable state sequence via dynamic programming to identify optimal boundaries. For sentence segmentation, HMMs integrate prosodic and lexical cues as features, treating sentence ends as specific states and applying Viterbi decoding to disambiguate abbreviations or punctuation; this approach has demonstrated robust performance in tokenizing mixed word and sentence boundaries simultaneously. A seminal implementation is the 1994 HMM for Japanese word segmentation, which avoids exhaustive lexicon searches by probabilistically resolving ambiguities in kanji-kana sequences. N-gram models contribute to boundary estimation by approximating the probability of a potential word or given preceding , such as P(word | previous n-1 words), to score candidate segmentations during search or resampling. In or lightly supervised settings, these models identify boundaries that maximize overall sequence likelihood, often using to explore high-probability paths; for instance, and models have been applied to child-directed speech for inferring word units without prior lexicons. This probabilistic scoring bridges local boundary decisions with global fluency, enhancing accuracy in languages like Chinese where between n-grams signals reliable splits. Conditional random fields (CRFs) advance these methods by directly modeling the of label sequences given the input text, incorporating diverse contextual features like part-of-speech tags or to avoid assumptions in HMMs. In linear-chain CRFs, the segmentation probability is factored over positions with potentials for transitions and emissions, decoded via Viterbi; for boundary detection, this is often simplified to P(boundary | features) = \softmax(w⊤f)\softmax(\mathbf{w}^\top \mathbf{f}), where \mathbf{w} are learned weights and \mathbf{f} encodes local features like surrounding tokens. CRFs excel in sentence boundary detection by jointly considering textual and acoustic features in speech transcripts, outperforming HMM baselines with error rates reduced by up to 20% on broadcast news corpora. An example is the HMM-based ChaSen morphological analyzer for Japanese, which applies Viterbi decoding over a vast to achieve over 99% accuracy on standard test sets for word segmentation. Similarly, CRF models for sentence boundaries have been effectively used in adjudicatory texts, leveraging domain-specific features for precise disambiguation.

Machine learning and neural approaches

Machine learning approaches to text segmentation often treat the task as a supervised classification problem, where potential boundaries between segments (such as words or sentences) are identified by training models on labeled data. Features commonly extracted include bag-of-words representations around candidate boundaries, n-grams, part-of-speech tags, and lexical cues like punctuation or capitalization. Classifiers such as logistic regression and support vector machines (SVMs) are trained to predict whether a boundary exists at a given position, achieving high accuracy on tasks like word segmentation in languages without spaces, such as Chinese or Vietnamese. For instance, SVMs have been applied to Vietnamese word segmentation using character-level features, outperforming earlier rule-based methods by leveraging discriminative training on boundary labels. Similarly, logistic regression models for sentence boundary detection utilize features like word frequencies and syntactic patterns to classify abbreviations or dialogue turns as true or false boundaries. Neural methods have advanced segmentation by incorporating sequence modeling to capture contextual dependencies, moving beyond hand-crafted features. Bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) networks combined with conditional random fields (CRF) are widely used for sequence tagging in word and sentence segmentation, where the Bi-LSTM encodes bidirectional context and the CRF enforces label constraints like valid transitions between "begin" and "inside" segment tags. This architecture excels in discourse segmentation, dividing text into elementary discourse units with F1 scores exceeding 90% on benchmark datasets by jointly optimizing emission and transition probabilities. More recently, BERT-based models, pre-trained on large corpora and fine-tuned for token classification, have set new standards for accuracy in sentence and topic boundary detection. Fine-tuned BERT variants achieve superior performance on linear text segmentation tasks by leveraging contextual embeddings, often surpassing Bi-LSTM-CRF by 2-5% in F1 on multilingual corpora. The training of CRF layers in these neural models typically minimizes the negative log-likelihood loss of the true label sequence given the input. The loss function is defined as: L=−log⁡P(y∣x)=−[w⊤F(x,y)−log⁡Z(x)]\mathcal{L} = -\log P(\mathbf{y} \mid \mathbf{x}) = -\left[ \mathbf{w}^\top \mathbf{F}(\mathbf{x}, \mathbf{y}) - \log Z(\mathbf{x}) \right] where y\mathbf{y} is the true label sequence, x\mathbf{x} is the input sequence, w\mathbf{w} are the model parameters, F(x,y)\mathbf{F}(\mathbf{x}, \mathbf{y}) is the feature vector summing unary and pairwise potentials, and Z(x)Z(\mathbf{x}) is the partition function summing scores over all possible label sequences. This formulation ensures over the sequence, improving boundary coherence. Unsupervised machine learning approaches, particularly for topic segmentation, rely on clustering techniques to identify shifts in thematic content without . Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic models represent documents as mixtures of latent topics, enabling segmentation by detecting changes in topic distributions across sliding windows of text. LDA-based methods, such as TopicTiling, compute topic similarities between adjacent windows and place boundaries where divergence exceeds a threshold, achieving competitive results on news corpora by capturing semantic coherence without . These models build on probabilistic foundations by treating topics as multinomial distributions over words, allowing flexible adaptation to domain-specific texts. Recent advances in encoders have enabled multilingual segmentation, particularly for low-resource languages lacking annotated data. Models like multilingual BERT (mBERT), fine-tuned on cross-lingual tasks, transfer knowledge from high-resource languages to segment unpunctuated texts in dialects or other under-resourced scripts. For example, mBERT-based classifiers for segmentation in low-resource achieve F1 scores of around 85%, leveraging shared subword representations to handle morphological complexity without language-specific training data. This approach extends to zero-shot settings, where pre-trained transformers generalize boundary detection across 100+ languages, marking a shift toward scalable, inclusive segmentation systems.

Evaluation and challenges

Evaluating the performance of text segmentation systems typically involves metrics that assess the accuracy of detected boundaries or segments compared to gold-standard annotations. For tasks like word and sentence segmentation, where the goal is precise boundary identification, common metrics include precision (the proportion of predicted boundaries that are correct), (the proportion of true boundaries that are predicted), and the F1-score, which harmonizes the two as F1=2×\precision×[\recall](/page/TheRecall)\precision+\recallF1 = 2 \times \frac{\precision \times [\recall](/page/The_Recall)}{\precision + \recall} for binary boundary classification. These metrics treat segmentation as a problem at potential boundary points, emphasizing error rates on held-out test sets. In topic segmentation, where segments represent coherent thematic units rather than strict boundaries, specialized metrics address the tolerance for minor boundary shifts. The P_k metric, introduced by Beeferman et al., measures the probability that two sentences separated by a fixed window are incorrectly grouped or split across predicted versus true topic boundaries, penalizing large-scale errors more heavily. Complementing this, the WindowDiff metric by Pevzner and Hearst evaluates boundary placement using a sliding window approach, rewarding proximity to true boundaries while avoiding over-segmentation penalties, and has become a due to its sensitivity to segmentation granularity. Benchmark datasets play a crucial role in standardizing evaluations across methods. For Chinese word segmentation, the SIGHAN bakeoff series provides corpora from diverse domains like and , with systems scored on F1 over correct word spans, revealing performance gaps in out-of-vocabulary handling (e.g., average F1 around 0.95 on closed tests but lower on ). Sentence segmentation evaluations often use the Switchboard corpus of conversational speech transcripts, annotated for disfluencies and boundaries, where F1 scores for boundary detection typically range from 0.85 to 0.95, highlighting challenges in informal speech. Despite advances, text segmentation faces significant challenges, particularly in multilingual and real-world settings. , where speakers alternate between languages mid-sentence, introduces ambiguity in boundary detection due to varying orthographic conventions and lacks sufficient annotated data, leading to performance drops in mixed-language texts compared to monolingual benchmarks. Error propagation in multi-stage NLP pipelines exacerbates issues, as inaccuracies in initial segmentation (e.g., word boundaries) cascade to downstream tasks like . Additionally, biases in training data—such as overrepresentation of formal English texts—can skew models toward majority-language patterns, resulting in poorer performance on low-resource languages or dialects. Looking ahead, future directions emphasize adapting segmentation to low-resource scenarios through , enabling models to infer boundaries in unseen languages via semantic transfer without task-specific data. Integration with large language models offers promise for robust, context-aware segmentation, leveraging their multilingual capabilities to mitigate code-switching issues and reduce dependencies, though challenges remain in computational efficiency and control.

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  28. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353071593_Unsupervised_Topic_Segmentation_of_Meetings_with_BERT_Embeddings
  29. https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstreams/5817d43f-b4c8-40b1-a4cb-a117143350eb/download
  30. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365024419_Segmentation-Based_Formulation_of_Slot_Filling_Task_for_Better_Generative_Modeling
  31. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.18980
  32. https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.09226
  33. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2949719124000098
  34. https://aclanthology.org/W19-5520.pdf
  35. https://spacy.io/api/tokenizer
  36. https://aclanthology.org/2020.nlposs-1.15.pdf
  37. https://tm-town-nlp-resources.s3.amazonaws.com/ch2.pdf
  38. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3749178/
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  40. https://nlp.stanford.edu/courses/cs224n/2007/fp/adarve-kwong-speriosu.pdf
  41. https://nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/javadoc/javanlp/edu/stanford/nlp/process/PTBTokenizer.html
  42. https://stanfordnlp.github.io/stanza/tokenize.html
  43. https://aclanthology.org/P16-1206.pdf
  44. http://sighan.cs.uchicago.edu/bakeoff2005/
  45. https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hearst/papers/pevzner-01.pdf
  46. https://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/switchboard/reseg-swbd.pdf
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