A Critique and Improvement of an Evaluation Metric for Text Segmentation
Top Cited Papers
- 1 March 2002
- journal article
- Published by MIT Press in Computational Linguistics
- Vol. 28 (1) , 19-36
- https://doi.org/10.1162/089120102317341756
Abstract
The Pk evaluation metric, initially proposed by Beeferman, Berger, and Lafferty (1997), is becoming the standard measure for assessing text segmentation algorithms. However, a theoretical analysis of the metric finds several problems: the metric penalizes false negatives more heavily than false positives, overpenalizes near misses, and is affected by variation in segment size distribution. We propose a simple modification to the Pk metric that remedies these problems. This new metric—called Window Diff—moves a fixed-sized window across the text and penalizes the algorithm whenever the number of boundaries within the window does not match the true number of boundaries for that window of text.Keywords
This publication has 3 references indexed in Scilit:
- Statistical Models for Text SegmentationMachine Learning, 1999
- Automatic Analysis, Theme Generation, and Summarization of Machine-Readable TextsScience, 1994
- A Note on the Generation of Random Normal DeviatesThe Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 1958