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Segment Any Text (arxiv.org)
1 point by jasondavies on Jul 2, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A sentence-splitting model is trained to work even without punctuation, then lightly adjusted for new styles like lyrics and legal text. It beat every tested tool, including large language models, across languages and domains, especially when text was messy, and ran three times faster.

Abstract · Segment Any Text: A Universal Approach for Robust, Efficient and Adaptable Sentence Segmentation

Segmenting text into sentences plays an early and crucial role in many NLP systems. This is commonly achieved by using rule-based or statistical methods relying on lexical features such as punctuation. Although some recent works no longer exclusively rely on punctuation, we find that no prior method achieves all of (i) robustness to missing punctuation, (ii) effective adaptability to new domains, and (iii) high efficiency. We introduce a new model - Segment any Text (SaT) - to solve this problem. To enhance robustness, we propose a new pretraining scheme that ensures less reliance on punctuation. To address adaptability, we introduce an extra stage of parameter-efficient fine-tuning, establishing state-of-the-art performance in distinct domains such as verses from lyrics and legal documents. Along the way, we introduce architectural modifications that result in a threefold gain in speed over the previous state of the art and solve spurious reliance on context far in the future. Finally, we introduce a variant of our model with fine-tuning on a diverse, multilingual mixture of sentence-segmented data, acting as a drop-in replacement and enhancement for existing segmentation tools. Overall, our contributions provide a universal approach for segmenting any text. Our method outperforms all baselines - including strong LLMs - across 8 corpora spanning diverse domains and languages, especially in practically relevant situations where text is poorly formatted. Our models and code, including documentation, are available at https://github.com/segment-any-text/wtpsplit under the MIT license.

Markus Frohmann, Igor Sterner, Ivan Vulić, Benjamin Minixhofer, Markus Schedl
arXiv:2406.16678 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Jun 24, 2024 · updated Oct 2, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to EMNLP 2024 Main

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