Text Segmentation based on Semantic Word Embeddings

Abstract: We explore the use of semantic word embeddings in text segmentation algorithms, including the C99 segmentation algorithm and new algorithms inspired by the distributed word vector representation. By developing a general framework for discussing a class of segmentation objectives, we study the effectiveness of greedy versus exact optimization approaches and suggest a new iterative refinement technique for improving the performance of greedy strategies. We compare our results to known benchmarks, using known metrics. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for an untrained method with our Content Vector Segmentation (CVS) on the Choi test set. Finally, we apply the segmentation procedure to an in-the-wild dataset consisting of text extracted from scholarly articles in the arXiv.org database.