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Chapter captor: Text segmentation in novels

  • Stony Brook University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

19 Scopus citations

Abstract

Books are typically segmented into chapters and sections, representing coherent sub-narratives and topics. We investigate the task of predicting chapter boundaries, as a proxy for the general task of segmenting long texts. We build a Project Gutenberg chapter segmentation data set of 9,126 English novels, using a hybrid approach combining neural inference and rule matching to recognize chapter title headers in books, achieving an F1-score of 0.77 on this task. Using this annotated data as ground truth after removing structural cues, we present cut-based and neural methods for chapter segmentation, achieving an F1-score of 0.453 on the challenging task of exact break prediction over book-length documents. Finally, we reveal interesting historical trends in the chapter structure of novels.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEMNLP 2020 - 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages8373-8383
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781952148606
DOIs
StatePublished - 2020
Event2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2020 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Nov 16 2020Nov 20 2020

Publication series

NameEMNLP 2020 - 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

Conference2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2020
CityVirtual, Online
Period11/16/2011/20/20

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