Breaking down a document or a conversation into multiple contiguous segments
based on its semantic structure is an important and challenging problem in NLP,
which can assist many downstream tasks. However, current works on topic
segmentation often focus on segmentation of structured texts. In this paper, we
comprehensively analyze the generalization capabilities of state-of-the-art
topic segmentation models on unstructured texts. We find that: (a) Current
strategies of pre-training on a large corpus of structured text such as
Wiki-727K do not help in transferability to unstructured texts. (b) Training
from scratch with only a relatively small-sized dataset of the target
unstructured domain improves the segmentation results by a significant margin.Comment: NeurIPS 2022 : ENLS