Evaluating Text Segmentation using Boundary Edit Distance
Chris Fournier · 2013
This work proposes a new segmentation evaluation metric, named boundary similarity (B), an inter-coder agreement coefficient adaptation, and a confusion-matrix for segmentation that are all based upon an adaptation of the boundary edit distance in Fournier and Inkpen (2012). Existing segmentation metrics such as Pk, WindowDiff, and Segmentation Similarity (S) are all able to award partial credit for near misses between boundaries, but are biased towards segmentations containing few or tightly clustered boundaries. Despite S’s improvements, its normalization also produces cosmetically high values that overestimate agreement & performance, leading this work to propose a solution. 1