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

Markus Frohmann, Igor Sterner, Ivan Vulić, Benjamin Minixhofer, Markus Schedl


Abstract
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 readily available at https://github.com/segment-any-text/wtpsplit under the MIT license.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.665
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11908–11941
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.665
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Markus Frohmann, Igor Sterner, Ivan Vulić, Benjamin Minixhofer, and Markus Schedl. 2024. Segment Any Text: A Universal Approach for Robust, Efficient and Adaptable Sentence Segmentation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 11908–11941, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Segment Any Text: A Universal Approach for Robust, Efficient and Adaptable Sentence Segmentation (Frohmann et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.665.pdf