Improving Context Modeling in Neural Topic Segmentation

Linzi Xing, Brad Hackinen, Giuseppe Carenini, Francesco Trebbi


Abstract
Topic segmentation is critical in key NLP tasks and recent works favor highly effective neural supervised approaches. However, current neural solutions are arguably limited in how they model context. In this paper, we enhance a segmenter based on a hierarchical attention BiLSTM network to better model context, by adding a coherence-related auxiliary task and restricted self-attention. Our optimized segmenter outperforms SOTA approaches when trained and tested on three datasets. We also the robustness of our proposed model in domain transfer setting by training a model on a large-scale dataset and testing it on four challenging real-world benchmarks. Furthermore, we apply our proposed strategy to two other languages (German and Chinese), and show its effectiveness in multilingual scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2020.aacl-main.63
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Kam-Fai Wong, Kevin Knight, Hua Wu
Venue:
AACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
626–636
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.aacl-main.63
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Linzi Xing, Brad Hackinen, Giuseppe Carenini, and Francesco Trebbi. 2020. Improving Context Modeling in Neural Topic Segmentation. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, pages 626–636, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Context Modeling in Neural Topic Segmentation (Xing et al., AACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.aacl-main.63.pdf
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