Using linguistically motivated features for paragraph boundary identification

Abstract

In this paper we propose a machine-learning approach to paragraph boundary identification which utilizes linguistically motivated features. We investigate the relation between paragraph boundaries and discourse cues, pronominalization and information structure. We test our algorithm on German data and report improvements over three baselines including a reimplementation of Sporleder & Lapata's (2006) work on paragraph segmentation. An analysis of the features' contribution suggests an interpretation of what paragraph boundaries indicate and what they depend on. © 2006 Association for Computational Linguistics.