Louis Chevalier


2020

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Hierarchical Text Segmentation for Medieval Manuscripts
Amir Hazem | Beatrice Daille | Dominique Stutzmann | Christopher Kermorvant | Louis Chevalier
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

In this paper, we address the segmentation of books of hours, Latin devotional manuscripts of the late Middle Ages, that exhibit challenging issues: a complex hierarchical entangled structure, variable content, noisy transcriptions with no sentence markers, and strong correlations between sections for which topical information is no longer sufficient to draw segmentation boundaries. We show that the main state-of-the-art segmentation methods are either inefficient or inapplicable for books of hours and propose a bottom-up greedy approach that considerably enhances the segmentation results. We stress the importance of such hierarchical segmentation of books of hours for historians to explore their overarching differences underlying conception about Church.