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TextTiling: segmenting text into multi-paragraph subtopic passages

Published 1 March 1997
Marti A. Hearst
Citations1,253
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score1.15
SNIP4.16

TL;DR

The algorithm is fully implemented and is shown to produce segmentation that corresponds well to human judgments of the subtopic boundaries of 12 texts, which should be useful for many text analysis tasks, including information retrieval and summarization.

Abstract

TextTiling is a technique for subdividing texts into multi-paragraph units that represent passages, or subtopics. The discourse cues for identifying major subtopic shifts are patterns of lexical co-occurrence and distribution. The algorithm is fully implemented and is shown to produce segmentation that corresponds well to human judgments of the subtopic boundaries of 12 texts. Multi-paragraph subtopic segmentation should be useful for many text analysis tasks, including information retrieval and summarization. 1.

Keywords

Computer ScienceArts and Humanities