关键词: 文本分割, 词汇链, TextTiling算法, Dotplotting算法

Abstract: Text segmentation is an important issue in information retrieval.Text segmentation can be defined as the automatic identification of boundaries between distinct textual units （segments） in written documents or speech sequences.Static written text，speech text and dynamic text can be segmented.The main motive of linear text segmentation is to find out topic boundaries，which is important for many natural language processing tasks，including summarization and QA system.This paper generalizes the main approaches on linear text segmentation on the basis of lots of literatures，points out the future research.

Key words: text segmentation, lexical chain, TextTiling algorithm, Dotplotting algorithm