Labeling of sentence boundaries is a necessary prerequisite for many natural language processing tasks, including part-of-speech tagging and sentence alignment. End-of-sentence punctuation marks are ambiguous; to disambiguate them most systems use brittle, special-purpose regular expression grammars and exception rules. As an alternative, we have developed an efficient, trainable algorithm that uses a lexicon with part-of-speech probabilities and a feed-forward neural network. After training for less than one minute, the method correctly labels over 98.5% of sentence boundaries in a corpus of over 27,000 sentence-boundary marks. We show the method to be efficient and easily adaptable to different text genres, including single-case texts.
Title
Adaptive Sentence Boundary Disambiguation
Published
Computer Science Division, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California, February 1994
Full Collection Name
Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences Technical Reports
Other Identifiers
CSD-94-797
Type
Text
Extent
10 p
Archive
The Engineering Library
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