A Syntactic and Lexical-Based Discourse Segmenter

We present a syntactic and lexically based discourse segmenter (SLSeg) that is designed to avoid the common problem of over-segmenting text. Segmentation is the first step in a discourse parser, a system that constructs discourse trees from elementary discourse units. We compare SLSeg to a probabilistic segmenter, showing that a conservative approach increases precision at the expense of recall, while retaining a high F-score across both formal and informal texts.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Milan Tofiloski, Julian Brooke, Maite Taboada
• Keywords: ACL 2009, Computational Linguistics, Discourse, Discourse Segmenter, Elementary Discourse Units