English

Indirectly Supervised English Sentence Break Prediction Using Paragraph Break Probability Estimates

Computation and Language 2021-09-27 v1

Abstract

This report explores the use of paragraph break probability estimates to help predict the location of sentence breaks in English natural language text. We show that a sentence break predictor based almost solely on paragraph break probability estimates can achieve high accuracy on this task. This sentence break predictor is trained almost entirely on a large amount of naturally occurring text without sentence break annotations, with only a small amount of annotated data needed to tune two hyperparameters. We also show that even better results can be achieved across in-domain and out-of-domain test data, if paragraph break probability signals are combined with a support vector machine classifier trained on a somewhat larger amount of sentence-break-annotated data. Numerous related issues are addressed along the way.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.12023,
  title  = {Indirectly Supervised English Sentence Break Prediction Using Paragraph Break Probability Estimates},
  author = {Robert C. Moore},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.12023},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T06:18:01.675Z