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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 4100–4104Cite as

Text Segmentation

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Synonyms

Document segmentation

Definition

Text segmentation is a precursor to text retrieval, automatic summarization, information retrieval (IR); language modeling (LM) and natural language processing (NLP). In written texts, text segmentation is the process of identifying the boundaries between words, phrases, or some other linguistic meaningful units, such as sentences or topics. The term separated from such processing is useful to help humans reading texts, and are mainly used to assist computers to do some artificial processes as fundamental units, such as NLP, and IR.

Historical Background

Natural language processing (NLP) is an important research field. Its primary problem is how to segment text correctly. Various segmentation methods have emerged in the past decades for different kinds of language and applications. Text segmentation is language dependent (different language has its own special problems, which would be introduced later), corpus dependent, character-set...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Beeferman D, Berger A, Lafferty J. Statistical models for text segmentation. Mach Learn. 1999;34(1–3):177–210.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  2. Grefenstette G, Tapanainen P. What is a word, what is a sentence? Problems of tokenization. In: Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Computational Lexicography and Text Research; 1994. p. 7–10.

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  3. Mikheev A. Tagging sentence boundaries. In: Proceedings of the 1st Conference on North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics; 2000. p. 264–71.

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  4. Reynar JC, Marcus MP.Topic segmentation: algorithms and applications. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Thesis. 1998.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China

    Haoda Huang & Benyu Zhang

Authors
  1. Haoda Huang
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  2. Benyu Zhang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Haoda Huang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Microsoft Research Asia, Microsoft Corporation, Beijing, Haidian, China

    Zheng Chen

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Huang, H., Zhang, B. (2018). Text Segmentation. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_421

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