A Maximum Entropy Approach to Identifying Sentence Boundaries

We present a trainable model for identifying sentence boundaries in raw text. Given a corpus annotated with sentence boundaries, our model learns to classify each occurrence of., ?, and / as either a valid or invalid sentence boundary. The training procedure requires no hand-crafted rules, lexica, part-of-speech tags, or domain-specific information. The model can therefore be trained easily on any genre of English, and should be trainable on any other Romanalphabet language. Performance is comparable to or better than the performance of similar systems, but we emphasize the simplicity of retraining for new domains.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: ANLP
• Authors: Jeffrey C. Reynar, Adwait Ratnaparkhi
• Keywords: ANLP 1997, Invalid Sentence Boundary, Sentence Boundaries, Trainable Model