# PySBD: Pragmatic Sentence Boundary Disambiguation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.09657 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09657/

## Key facts

- Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Making Science Simple: Corpora for the Lay Summarisation of Scientific Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09932/) (2022)
- [Segment Any Text: A Universal Approach for Robust, Efficient and Adaptable Sentence Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16678/) (2024)
- [VILA: Improving Structured Content Extraction from Scientific PDFs Using Visual Layout Groups](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00676/) (2021)
- [ParaGuide: Guided Diffusion Paraphrasers for Plug-and-Play Textual Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15459/) (2023)
- [Where's the Point? Self-Supervised Multilingual Punctuation-Agnostic Sentence Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18893/) (2023)
- [High-Fidelity Simultaneous Speech-To-Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03382/) (2025)
- [The MuSe 2023 Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge: Mimicked Emotions, Cross-Cultural Humour, and Personalisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03369/) (2023)
- [SciNews: From Scholarly Complexities to Public Narratives -- A Dataset for Scientific News Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17768/) (2024)
- [Using Multiple Instance Learning to Build Multimodal Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05561/) (2022)
- [MEMERAG: A Multilingual End-to-End Meta-Evaluation Benchmark for Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17163/) (2025)
- [Glitter or Gold? Deriving Structured Insights from Sustainability Reports via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05628/) (2023)
- [Zero-knowledge LLM hallucination detection and mitigation through fine-grained cross-model consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14314/) (2025)
- [Beyond Film Subtitles: Is YouTube the Best Approximation of Spoken Vocabulary?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03240/) (2024)
- [Modeling Emotional Trajectories in Written Stories Utilizing Transformers and Weakly-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02251/) (2024)
- [The MuSe 2024 Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge: Social Perception and Humor Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07753/) (2024)
- [uMedSum: A Unified Framework for Advancing Medical Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12095/) (2024)
- [WikiSQE: A Large-Scale Dataset for Sentence Quality Estimation in Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05928/) (2023)
- [Cross-Lingual Knowledge Distillation for Answer Sentence Selection in Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16302/) (2023)
- [WikiSplit++: Easy Data Refinement for Split and Rephrase](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09002/) (2024)
- [Topic Modeling with Fine-tuning LLMs and Bag of Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03099/) (2024)
- [Difficulty-Adaptive Tree-Structured Policy Optimization for Expanding Reasoning Coverage in RLVR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08650/) (2026)
- [Efficient and Flexible Topic Modeling using Pretrained Embeddings and Bag of Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03106/) (2023)
- [Sample-Specific Debiasing for Better Image-Text Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13181/) (2023)
- [WiDe-analysis: Enabling One-click Content Moderation Analysis on Wikipedia's Articles for Deletion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05655/) (2024)
- [DOLFIN -- Document-Level Financial test set for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03053/) (2025)
- [Precise Legal Sentence Boundary Detection for Retrieval at Scale: NUPunkt and CharBoundary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04131/) (2025)
- [OpenWHO: A Document-Level Parallel Corpus for Health Translation in Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16048/) (2025)
- [Arabic Sentence Segmentation Across Genres and Punctuation Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08025/) (2026)
- [A Natural Language Processing Pipeline for Detecting Informal Data References in Academic Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11651/) (2022)
- [CiteCaseLAW: Citation Worthiness Detection in Caselaw for Legal Assistive Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03508/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present a rule-based sentence boundary disambiguation Python package that works out-of-the-box for 22 languages. We aim to provide a realistic segmenter which can provide logical sentences even when the format and domain of the input text is unknown. In our work, we adapt the Golden Rules Set (a language-specific set of sentence boundary exemplars) originally implemented as a ruby gem - pragmatic_segmenter - which we ported to Python with additional improvements and functionality. PySBD passes 97.92% of the Golden Rule Set exemplars for English, an improvement of 25% over the next best open-source Python tool.