Chapter Captor: Text Segmentation in Novels

Charuta Pethe, Allen Kim, Steve Skiena


Abstract
Books are typically segmented into chapters and sections, representing coherent sub-narratives and topics. We investigate the task of predicting chapter boundaries, as a proxy for the general task of segmenting long texts. We build a Project Gutenberg chapter segmentation data set of 9,126 English novels, using a hybrid approach combining neural inference and rule matching to recognize chapter title headers in books, achieving an F1-score of 0.77 on this task. Using this annotated data as ground truth after removing structural cues, we present cut-based and neural methods for chapter segmentation, achieving a F1-score of 0.453 on the challenging task of exact break prediction over book-length documents. Finally, we reveal interesting historical trends in the chapter structure of novels.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.672
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8373–8383
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.672
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.672
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Charuta Pethe, Allen Kim, and Steve Skiena. 2020. Chapter Captor: Text Segmentation in Novels. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 8373–8383, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Chapter Captor: Text Segmentation in Novels (Pethe et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.672.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938849
Code
 cpethe/chapter-captor