An Improved Model of Dotplotting for Text Segmentation

The Dotplotting method has been widely used for text segmentation for its merits in detecting lexical repetition in global context. However, a theoretical analysis of its segmentation criterion function finds several deficiencies. The original function can not make full use of the text structure features and does not suit the text segmentation task very well. We propose an improved model (MMD model) that resolves these deficiencies. Comparative experimental results on the synthetic corpus and real corpus have shown that MMD model reduces the error rate of the original Dotplotting method by more than 20 percent, and outperforms other existing methods derived from Dotplotting.