# Sentence Splitter: Uncovering Latent Factual Structure for Self-Supervised Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19845 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19845/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [STaR: Bootstrapping Reasoning With Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14465/) (2022)
- [UnifiedQA: Crossing Format Boundaries With a Single QA System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00700/) (2020)
- [Orca: Progressive Learning from Complex Explanation Traces of GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02707/) (2023)
- [KEPLER: A Unified Model for Knowledge Embedding and Pre-trained Language Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06136/) (2019)
- [KG-BERT: BERT for Knowledge Graph Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03193/) (2019)
- [UL2: Unifying Language Learning Paradigms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05131/) (2022)
- [COMET-ATOMIC 2020: On Symbolic and Neural Commonsense Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05953/) (2020)
- [UNICORN on RAINBOW: A Universal Commonsense Reasoning Model on a New Multitask Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13009/) (2021)
- [Analyzing Commonsense Emergence in Few-shot Knowledge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00297/) (2021)
- [Split and Rephrase](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06971/) (2017)
- [Sequence Modeling via Segmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.07463/) (2017)
- [Segmental Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06018/) (2015)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces Sentence Splitter, a self-supervised framework built upon a T5-based encoder--decoder architecture for uncovering the latent factual structure of natural language sentences. The proposed method identifies the semantic boundary between a descriptive prefix (head) and its factual completion (tail) by formulating sentence splitting as a discrete segmentation problem, where a sentence of length N admits N possible split points but only one recovers the intended head--tail structure. Rather than explicitly searching over all candidate boundaries, the model learns to recover the factual completion through probabilistic sequence generation. To eliminate the need for manual annotation, symbolic head--tail pairs are first verbalized into natural-language templates that provide supervision for training the Sentence Splitter. The trained splitter is then applied to raw text to extract aligned prefix--tail pairs, which are subsequently used to train a generative model that proposes additional plausible completions through a lightweight bootstrapping process. This unified pipeline provides a scalable and structure-aware approach to constructing self-supervised training data while bridging symbolic knowledge and natural language. Experiments on both structured and naturally occurring text demonstrate that the proposed splitter generalizes beyond synthetic templates and that the resulting structure-aware supervision consistently improves downstream performance on knowledge graph completion and commonsense question answering, highlighting the effectiveness of recovering latent factual structure for knowledge-centric NLP.