SECTOR: A Neural Model for Coherent Topic Segmentation and Classification
Sebastian Arnold, Rudolf Schneider, Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, Felix A. Gers, Alexander Löser
Abstract
When searching for information, a human reader first glances over a document, spots relevant sections, and then focuses on a few sentences for resolving her intention. However, the high variance of document structure complicates the identification of the salient topic of a given section at a glance. To tackle this challenge, we present SECTOR, a model to support machine reading systems by segmenting documents into coherent sections and assigning topic labels to each section. Our deep neural network architecture learns a latent topic embedding over the course of a document. This can be leveraged to classify local topics from plain text and segment a document at topic shifts. In addition, we contribute WikiSection, a publicly available data set with 242k labeled sections in English and German from two distinct domains: diseases and cities. From our extensive evaluation of 20 architectures, we report a highest score of 71.6% F1 for the segmentation and classification of 30 topics from the English city domain, scored by our SECTOR long short-term memory model with Bloom filter embeddings and bidirectional segmentation. This is a significant improvement of 29.5 points F1 over state-of-the-art CNN classifiers with baseline segmentation.- Anthology ID:
- Q19-1011
- Volume:
- Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 7
- Month:
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Cambridge, MA
- Editors:
- Lillian Lee, Mark Johnson, Brian Roark, Ani Nenkova
- Venue:
- TACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- MIT Press
- Note:
- Pages:
- 169–184
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/Q19-1011
- DOI:
- 10.1162/tacl_a_00261
- Cite (ACL):
- Sebastian Arnold, Rudolf Schneider, Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, Felix A. Gers, and Alexander Löser. 2019. SECTOR: A Neural Model for Coherent Topic Segmentation and Classification. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 7:169–184.
- Cite (Informal):
- SECTOR: A Neural Model for Coherent Topic Segmentation and Classification (Arnold et al., TACL 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/Q19-1011.pdf
- Code
- sebastianarnold/WikiSection + additional community code
- Data
- WikiSection