Samet Tenekeci


2023

Quotes are universally appealing. Humans recognize good quotes and save them for later reference. However, it may pose a challenge for machines. In this work, we build a new corpus of quotes and propose a new task, quote detection, as a type of span detection. We retrieve the quote set from Goodreads and collect the spans through a custom search on the Gutenberg Book Corpus. We measure unique vocabulary usage by a state-of-the-art language model and perform comparative statistical analysis against the Cornell Movie-Quotes Corpus. Furthermore, we run two types of baselines for quote detection: Conditional random field (CRF) and summarization with pointer-generator networks and Bidirectional and Auto-Regressive Transformers (BART). The results show that the neural sequence-to-sequence models perform substantially better than CRF. From the viewpoint of neural extractive summarization, quote detection seems easier than news summarization. Moreover, model fine-tuning on our corpus and the Cornell Movie-Quotes Corpus introduces incremental performance boosts.