Background

Figure: From quotations to passages.

The figure above shows the segmentation process which is used to aggregate quotations to form passages by combining overlapping quotations.

In the example, there are four scholarly works. Three of which have one quotation and one has two quotations. w₁ to w₁₃ refer to arbitrary words. The resulting passage spans from w₁ to w₁₀. w₁₁ to w₁₃ are not part of the passage as there are no overlapping quotations. During this process of forming a passage from quotations, we also generate minimal, non overlapping segments.

Examples

Possible scenarios include a passage formed by just one quotation in which case the passage, segment and quotation are identical. It is also possible that different texts contain the exact same quotation in which case the resulting passage would be the exact length of the underlying quotations and only have one segment.