Text segmentation into paragraphs based on local text cohesion

Abstract

The problem of automatic text segmentation is subcategorized into two different problems: thematic segmentation into rather large topically selfcontained sections and splitting into paragraphs, i.e., lexico-grammatical segmentation of lower level. In this paper we consider the latter problem. We propose a method of reasonably splitting text into paragraph based on a text cohesion measure. Specifically, we propose a method of quantitative evaluation of text cohesion based on a large linguistic resource - a collocation network. At each step, our algorithm compares word occurrences in a text against a large DB of collocations and semantic links between words in the given natural language. The procedure consists in evaluation of the cohesion function, its smoothing, normalization, and comparing with a specially constructed threshold.