# Segmenting Messy Text: Detecting Boundaries in Text Derived from Historical Newspaper Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.12773 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12773/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Neural Architectures for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01360/) (2016)
- [End-to-end Sequence Labeling via Bi-directional LSTM-CNNs-CRF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01354/) (2016)
- [Text Segmentation as a Supervised Learning Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09337/) (2018)
- [SECTOR: A Neural Model for Coherent Topic Segmentation and Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04793/) (2019)
- [Two-Level Transformer and Auxiliary Coherence Modeling for Improved Text Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00891/) (2020)
- [Language Model Pre-training for Hierarchical Document Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09128/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text segmentation, the task of dividing a document into sections, is often a prerequisite for performing additional natural language processing tasks. Existing text segmentation methods have typically been developed and tested using clean, narrative-style text with segments containing distinct topics. Here we consider a challenging text segmentation task: dividing newspaper marriage announcement lists into units of one announcement each. In many cases the information is not structured into sentences, and adjacent segments are not topically distinct from each other. In addition, the text of the announcements, which is derived from images of historical newspapers via optical character recognition, contains many typographical errors. As a result, these announcements are not amenable to segmentation with existing techniques. We present a novel deep learning-based model for segmenting such text and show that it significantly outperforms an existing state-of-the-art method on our task.