Hierarchical Text Segmentation for Medieval Manuscripts

Amir Hazem, Beatrice Daille, Dominique Stutzmann, Christopher Kermorvant, Louis Chevalier


Abstract
In this paper, we address the segmentation of books of hours, Latin devotional manuscripts of the late Middle Ages, that exhibit challenging issues: a complex hierarchical entangled structure, variable content, noisy transcriptions with no sentence markers, and strong correlations between sections for which topical information is no longer sufficient to draw segmentation boundaries. We show that the main state-of-the-art segmentation methods are either inefficient or inapplicable for books of hours and propose a bottom-up greedy approach that considerably enhances the segmentation results. We stress the importance of such hierarchical segmentation of books of hours for historians to explore their overarching differences underlying conception about Church.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.549
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6240–6251
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.549
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.549
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Amir Hazem, Beatrice Daille, Dominique Stutzmann, Christopher Kermorvant, and Louis Chevalier. 2020. Hierarchical Text Segmentation for Medieval Manuscripts. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6240–6251, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Hierarchical Text Segmentation for Medieval Manuscripts (Hazem et al., COLING 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2020.coling-main.549.pdf
Code
 hazemamir/greedy_text_segmentation