Sentence position is a strong feature for news summarization, since the lead often (but not always) summarizes the key points of the article. In this paper, we show that recent neural systems excessively exploit this trend, which although powerful for many inputs, is also detrimental when summarizing documents where important content should be extracted from later parts of the article. We propose two techniques to make systems sensitive to the importance of content in different parts of the article. The first technique employs 'unbiased' data; i.e., randomly shuffled sentences of the source document, to pretrain the model. The second technique uses an auxiliary ROUGE-based loss that encourages the model to distribute importance scores throughout a document by mimicking sentence-level ROUGE scores on the training data. We show that these techniques significantly improve the performance of a competitive reinforcement learning based extractive system, with the auxiliary loss being more powerful than pretraining.
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；NEC Labs America（NEC美国实验室）
Text summarization has been intensively studied in many languages, and some languages have reached advanced stages. Yet, Arabic Text Summarization (ATS) is still in its developing stages. Existing ATS datasets are either small or lack diversity. We build, LANS, a large-scale and diverse dataset for Arabic Text Summarization task. LANS offers 8.4 million articles and their summaries extracted from newspapers websites metadata between 1999 and 2019. The high-quality and diverse summaries are written by journalists from 22 major Arab newspapers, and include an eclectic mix of at least more than 7…
In this work, we study abstractive text summarization by exploring different models such as LSTM-encoder-decoder with attention, pointer-generator networks, coverage mechanisms, and transformers. Upon extensive and careful hyperparameter tuning we compare the proposed architectures against each other for the abstractive text summarization task. Finally, as an extension of our work, we apply our text summarization model as a feature extractor for a fake news detection task where the news articles prior to classification will be summarized and the results are compared against the classification …
Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María（费德里科圣玛丽亚技术大学）；Dalhousie University（达尔豪斯大学）
Summarization has usually relied on gold standard summaries to train extractive or abstractive models. Social media brings a hurdle to summarization techniques since it requires addressing a multi-document multi-author approach. We address this challenging task by introducing a novel method that generates abstractive summaries of online news discussions. Our method extends a BERT-based architecture, including an attention encoding that fed comments' likes during the training stage. To train our model, we define a task which consists of reconstructing high impact comments based on popularity (l…
A common method for extractive multi-document news summarization is to re-formulate it as a single-document summarization problem by concatenating all documents as a single meta-document. However, this method neglects the relative importance of documents. We propose a simple approach to reorder the documents according to their relative importance before concatenating and summarizing them. The reordering makes the salient content easier to learn by the summarization model. Experiments show that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods with more complex architectures.
Automatic generation of summaries from multiple news articles is a valuable tool as the number of online publications grows rapidly. Single document summarization (SDS) systems have benefited from advances in neural encoder-decoder model thanks to the availability of large datasets. However, multi-document summarization (MDS) of news articles has been limited to datasets of a couple of hundred examples. In this paper, we introduce Multi-News, the first large-scale MDS news dataset. Additionally, we propose an end-to-end model which incorporates a traditional extractive summarization model with…
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）
Automatic text summarization has been studied in a variety of domains and languages. However, this does not hold for the Russian language. To overcome this issue, we present Gazeta, the first dataset for summarization of Russian news. We describe the properties of this dataset and benchmark several extractive and abstractive models. We demonstrate that the dataset is a valid task for methods of text summarization for Russian. Additionally, we prove the pretrained mBART model to be useful for Russian text summarization.
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
We construct Global Voices, a multilingual dataset for evaluating cross-lingual summarization methods. We extract social-network descriptions of Global Voices news articles to cheaply collect evaluation data for into-English and from-English summarization in 15 languages. Especially, for the into-English summarization task, we crowd-source a high-quality evaluation dataset based on guidelines that emphasize accuracy, coverage, and understandability. To ensure the quality of this dataset, we collect human ratings to filter out bad summaries, and conduct a survey on humans, which shows that the …
We show that a simple unsupervised masking objective can approach near supervised performance on abstractive multi-document news summarization. Our method trains a state-of-the-art neural summarization model to predict the masked out source document with highest lexical centrality relative to the multi-document group. In experiments on the Multi-News dataset, our masked training objective yields a system that outperforms past unsupervised methods and, in human evaluation, surpasses the best supervised method without requiring access to any ground-truth summaries. Further, we evaluate how diffe…
A Mixed-Language Multi-Document News Summarization Dataset and a Graphs-Based Extract-Generate Model
Faculty of Information Engineering and Automation, Kunming University of Science and Technology（昆明理工大学信息工程与自动化学院）；Yunnan Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence, Kunming University of Science and Technology（昆明理工大学云南省人工智能重点实验室）
Microsoft Cognitive Services Research Group（微软认知服务研究组）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
A typical journalistic convention in news articles is to deliver the most salient information in the beginning, also known as the lead bias. While this phenomenon can be exploited in generating a summary, it has a detrimental effect on teaching a model to discriminate and extract important information in general. We propose that this lead bias can be leveraged in our favor in a simple and effective way to pre-train abstractive news summarization models on large-scale unlabeled news corpora: predicting the leading sentences using the rest of an article. We collect a massive news corpus and cond…
In this work, we develop a neural network based model which leverages dependency parsing to capture cross-positional dependencies and grammatical structures. With the help of linguistic signals, sentence-level relations can be correctly captured, thus improving news documents summarization performance. Empirical studies demonstrate that this simple but effective method outperforms existing works on the benchmark dataset. Extensive analyses examine different settings and configurations of the proposed model which provide a good reference to the community.
Redfin Inc.（Redfin公司）；University of Akron（阿克伦大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
We present a robust approach for detecting intrinsic sentence importance in news, by training on two corpora of document-summary pairs. When used for single-document summarization, our approach, combined with the "beginning of document" heuristic, outperforms a state-of-the-art summarizer and the beginning-of-article baseline in both automatic and manual evaluations. These results represent an important advance because in the absence of cross-document repetition, single document summarizers for news have not been able to consistently outperform the strong beginning-of-article baseline.
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Amazon Alexa（亚马逊Alexa）；AWS AI Labs（AWS人工智能实验室）
Pre-trained and fine-tuned news summarizers are expected to generalize to news articles unseen in the fine-tuning (training) phase. However, these articles often contain specifics, such as new events and people, a summarizer could not learn about in training. This applies to scenarios such as a news publisher training a summarizer on dated news and summarizing incoming recent news. In this work, we explore the first application of transductive learning to summarization where we further fine-tune models on test set inputs. Specifically, we construct pseudo summaries from salient article sentenc…
The foundation for the research of summarization in the Czech language was laid by the work of Straka et al. (2018). They published the SumeCzech, a large Czech news-based summarization dataset, and proposed several baseline approaches. However, it is clear from the achieved results that there is a large space for improvement. In our work, we focus on the impact of named entities on the summarization of Czech news articles. First, we annotate SumeCzech with named entities. We propose a new metric ROUGE_NE that measures the overlap of named entities between the true and generated summaries, and…
Text summarization models are approaching human levels of fidelity. Existing benchmarking corpora provide concordant pairs of full and abridged versions of Web, news or, professional content. To date, all summarization datasets operate under a one-size-fits-all paradigm that may not reflect the full range of organic summarization needs. Several recently proposed models (e.g., plug and play language models) have the capacity to condition the generated summaries on a desired range of themes. These capacities remain largely unused and unevaluated as there is no dedicated dataset that would suppor…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for automatic summarization but the reasons behind their successes are poorly understood. By conducting a human evaluation on ten LLMs across different pretraining methods, prompts, and model scales, we make two important observations. First, we find instruction tuning, and not model size, is the key to the LLM's zero-shot summarization capability. Second, existing studies have been limited by low-quality references, leading to underestimates of human performance and lower few-shot and finetuning performance. To better evaluate LLMs, we perform h…
Automatic text summarization aims to produce a brief but crucial summary for the input documents. Both extractive and abstractive methods have witnessed great success in English datasets in recent years. However, there has been a minimal exploration of text summarization in Chinese, limited by the lack of large-scale datasets. In this paper, we present a large-scale Chinese news summarization dataset CNewSum, which consists of 304,307 documents and human-written summaries for the news feed. It has long documents with high-abstractive summaries, which can encourage document-level understanding …
University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute（南加州大学信息科学研究所）；School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
Insight Centre for Data Analytics, University College Dublin（都柏林大学洞察数据分析中心）；Aylien Ltd.（Aylien有限公司）
Previous work on automatic news timeline summarization (TLS) leaves an unclear picture about how this task can generally be approached and how well it is currently solved. This is mostly due to the focus on individual subtasks, such as date selection and date summarization, and to the previous lack of appropriate evaluation metrics for the full TLS task. In this paper, we compare different TLS strategies using appropriate evaluation frameworks, and propose a simple and effective combination of methods that improves over the state-of-the-art on all tested benchmarks. For a more robust evaluatio…
An educated and informed consumption of media content has become a challenge in modern times. With the shift from traditional news outlets to social media and similar venues, a major concern is that readers are becoming encapsulated in "echo chambers" and may fall prey to fake news and disinformation, lacking easy access to dissenting views. We suggest a novel task aiming to alleviate some of these concerns -- that of detecting articles that most effectively counter the arguments -- and not just the stance -- made in a given text. We study this problem in the context of debate speeches. Given …
Microsoft Cognitive Services Research Group（微软认知服务研究组）
In this paper, we bring a new way of digesting news content by introducing the task of segmenting a news article into multiple sections and generating the corresponding summary to each section. We make two contributions towards this new task. First, we create and make available a dataset, SegNews, consisting of 27k news articles with sections and aligned heading-style section summaries. Second, we propose a novel segmentation-based language generation model adapted from pre-trained language models that can jointly segment a document and produce the summary for each section. Experimental result…
pressrelations GmbH（pressrelations有限公司）；Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf（海因里希·海涅杜塞尔多夫大学）
In this work, we present the results of a systematic study to investigate the (commercial) benefits of automatic text summarization systems in a real world scenario. More specifically, we define a use case in the context of media monitoring and media response analysis and claim that even using a simple query-based extractive approach can dramatically save the processing time of the employees without significantly reducing the quality of their work.
The amount of text data available online is increasing at a very fast pace hence text summarization has become essential. Most of the modern recommender and text classification systems require going through a huge amount of data. Manually generating precise and fluent summaries of lengthy articles is a very tiresome and time-consuming task. Hence generating automated summaries for the data and using it to train machine learning models will make these models space and time-efficient. Extractive summarization and abstractive summarization are two separate methods of generating summaries. The ext…
In news articles the lead bias is a common phenomenon that usually dominates the learning signals for neural extractive summarizers, severely limiting their performance on data with different or even no bias. In this paper, we introduce a novel technique to demote lead bias and make the summarizer focus more on the content semantics. Experiments on two news corpora with different degrees of lead bias show that our method can effectively demote the model's learned lead bias and improve its generality on out-of-distribution data, with little to no performance loss on in-distribution data.
Recent advances in natural language processing have enabled automation of a wide range of tasks, including machine translation, named entity recognition, and sentiment analysis. Automated summarization of documents, or groups of documents, however, has remained elusive, with many efforts limited to extraction of keywords, key phrases, or key sentences. Accurate abstractive summarization has yet to be achieved due to the inherent difficulty of the problem, and limited availability of training data. In this paper, we propose a topic-centric unsupervised multi-document summarization framework to …
One of the most challenging aspects of current single-document news summarization is that the summary often contains 'extrinsic hallucinations', i.e., facts that are not present in the source document, which are often derived via world knowledge. This causes summarization systems to act more like open-ended language models tending to hallucinate facts that are erroneous. In this paper, we mitigate this problem with the help of multiple supplementary resource documents assisting the task. We present a new dataset MiRANews and benchmark existing summarization models. In contrast to multi-documen…
IBM Research（IBM研究院）；Microsoft（微软）；Ben Gurion University（本·古里安大学）
Recent work in the field of automatic summarization and headline generation focuses on maximizing ROUGE scores for various news datasets. We present an alternative, extrinsic, evaluation metric for this task, Answering Performance for Evaluation of Summaries. APES utilizes recent progress in the field of reading-comprehension to quantify the ability of a summary to answer a set of manually created questions regarding central entities in the source article. We first analyze the strength of this metric by comparing it to known manual evaluation metrics. We then present an end-to-end neural abstr…
NTS-CoT: Mitigating Hallucinations in LLM-based News Timeline Summarization with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Central South University（中南大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；Suzhou Aerospace Information Research Institute（苏州空天信息研究院）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）
Much progress has been made in text summarization, fueled by neural architectures using large-scale training corpora. However, in the news domain, neural models easily overfit by leveraging position-related features due to the prevalence of the inverted pyramid writing style. In addition, there is an unmet need to generate a variety of summaries for different users. In this paper, we propose a neural framework that can flexibly control summary generation by introducing a set of sub-aspect functions (i.e. importance, diversity, position). These sub-aspect functions are regulated by a set of con…
Shahjalal University of Science and Technology（沙贾拉勒科技大学）
Abstractive summarization is the process of generating novel sentences based on the information extracted from the original text document while retaining the context. Due to abstractive summarization's underlying complexities, most of the past research work has been done on the extractive summarization approach. Nevertheless, with the triumph of the sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model, abstractive summarization becomes more viable. Although a significant number of notable research has been done in the English language based on abstractive summarization, only a couple of works have been done o…
Embrace Divergence for Richer Insights: A Multi-document Summarization Benchmark and a Case Study on Summarizing Diverse Information from News Articles
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Salesforce AI Research（Salesforce人工智能研究部门）
School of Electrical Engineering and Informatics（电气工程与信息学院）；Bandung Institute of Technology（万隆理工学院）
In this paper, we proposed a multi-document summarization system using semantic role labeling (SRL) and semantic graph for Indonesian news articles. In order to improve existing summarizer, our system modified summarizer that employed subject, predicate, object, and adverbial (SVOA) extraction for predicate argument structure (PAS) extraction. SVOA extraction is replaced with SRL model for Indonesian. We also replace the genetic algorithm to identify important PAS with the decision tree classifier since the summarizer without genetic algorithm gave better performance. The decision tree model i…
Abstractive summarization models typically learn to capture the salient information from scratch implicitly. Recent literature adds extractive summaries as guidance for abstractive summarization models to provide hints of salient content and achieves better performance. However, extractive summaries as guidance could be over strict, leading to information loss or noisy signals. Furthermore, it cannot easily adapt to documents with various abstractiveness. As the number and allocation of salience content pieces vary, it is hard to find a fixed threshold deciding which content should be included…
University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Despite the recent developments on neural summarization systems, the underlying logic behind the improvements from the systems and its corpus-dependency remains largely unexplored. Position of sentences in the original text, for example, is a well known bias for news summarization. Following in the spirit of the claim that summarization is a combination of sub-functions, we define three sub-aspects of summarization: position, importance, and diversity and conduct an extensive analysis of the biases of each sub-aspect with respect to the domain of nine different summarization corpora (e.g., new…
Research Training Group AIPHES；UKP Lab Computer Science Department, Technische Universit \"a t Darmstadt www.aiphes.tu-darmstadt.de, www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de
Live blogs are an increasingly popular news format to cover breaking news and live events in online journalism. Online news websites around the world are using this medium to give their readers a minute by minute update on an event. Good summaries enhance the value of the live blogs for a reader but are often not available. In this paper, we study a way of collecting corpora for automatic live blog summarization. In an empirical evaluation using well-known state-of-the-art summarization systems, we show that live blogs corpus poses new challenges in the field of summarization. We make our tool…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Media news framing bias can increase political polarization and undermine civil society. The need for automatic mitigation methods is therefore growing. We propose a new task, a neutral summary generation from multiple news articles of the varying political leanings to facilitate balanced and unbiased news reading. In this paper, we first collect a new dataset, illustrate insights about framing bias through a case study, and propose a new effective metric and model (NeuS-TITLE) for the task. Based on our discovery that title provides a good signal for framing bias, we present NeuS-TITLE that l…
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Walmart NexTech（沃尔玛NexTech）
Generic summaries try to cover an entire document and query-based summaries try to answer document-specific questions. But real users' needs often fall in between these extremes and correspond to aspects, high-level topics discussed among similar types of documents. In this paper, we collect a dataset of realistic aspect-oriented summaries, AspectNews, which covers different subtopics about articles in news sub-domains. We annotate data across two domains of articles, earthquakes and fraud investigations, where each article is annotated with two distinct summaries focusing on different aspects…
The distribution of fake news is not a new but a rapidly growing problem. The shift to news consumption via social media has been one of the drivers for the spread of misleading and deliberately wrong information, as in addition to it of easy use there is rarely any veracity monitoring. Due to the harmful effects of such fake news on society, the detection of these has become increasingly important. We present an approach to the problem that combines the power of transformer-based language models while simultaneously addressing one of their inherent problems. Our framework, CMTR-BERT, combines…
INESC ID Lisboa（里斯本高等工程学院信息与决策系统研究所）；Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL)（里斯本大学学院（ISCTE-IUL））；Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学高等技术学院）
We assess the performance of generic text summarization algorithms applied to films and documentaries, using the well-known behavior of summarization of news articles as reference. We use three datasets: (i) news articles, (ii) film scripts and subtitles, and (iii) documentary subtitles. Standard ROUGE metrics are used for comparing generated summaries against news abstracts, plot summaries, and synopses. We show that the best performing algorithms are LSA, for news articles and documentaries, and LexRank and Support Sets, for films. Despite the different nature of films and documentaries, the…
