Topic Segmentation

A natural language processing technique that automatically divides a document into coherent sections based on changes in topic or subject matter. Topic segmentation algorithms detect boundaries where the semantic content of adjacent sentences or paragraphs shifts significantly, using methods such as word embeddings, sentence similarity matrices, and clustering algorithms. In accessibility, topic segmentation has promising applications for generating automatic headings and structural landmarks in unstructured web content, which can help screen reader users navigate long documents that lack proper heading markup. Combined with topic labelling (generating descriptive keywords for each segment), it can recreate a form of document structure that enables non-visual text skimming.