A Maximum Entropy Approach to Identifying Sentence Boundaries

Abstract

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 Roman-alphabet language. Performance is comparable to or better than the performance of similar systems, but we emphasize the simplicity of retraining for new domains.