We present a new summarization task, generating summaries of novel chapters using summary/chapter pairs from online study guides. This is a harder task than the news summarization task, given the chapter length as well as the extreme paraphrasing and generalization found in the summaries. We focus on extractive summarization, which requires the creation of a gold-standard set of extractive summaries. We present a new metric for aligning reference summary sentences with chapter sentences to create gold extracts and also experiment with different alignment methods. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvement over prior alignment approaches for our task as shown through automatic metrics and a crowd-sourced pyramid analysis. We make our data collection scripts available at https://github.com/manestay/novel-chapter-dataset .
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；AWS AI Labs（AWS人工智能实验室）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Summarizing novel chapters is a difficult task due to the input length and the fact that sentences that appear in the desired summaries draw content from multiple places throughout the chapter. We present a pipelined extractive-abstractive approach where the extractive step filters the content that is passed to the abstractive component. Extremely lengthy input also results in a highly skewed dataset towards negative instances for extractive summarization; we thus adopt a margin ranking loss for extraction to encourage separation between positive and negative examples. Our extraction component…
Isfahan University of Technology（伊斯法罕理工大学）；Medical University of Vienna（维也纳医科大学）
This chapter gives an overview of recent advances in the field of biomedical text summarization. Different types of challenges are introduced, and methods are discussed concerning the type of challenge that they address. Biomedical literature summarization is explored as a leading trend in the field, and some future lines of work are pointed out. Underlying methods of recent summarization systems are briefly explained and the most significant evaluation results are mentioned. The primary purpose of this chapter is to review the most significant research efforts made in the current decade towar…
This paper explores the effect of using multitask learning for abstractive summarization in the context of small training corpora. In particular, we incorporate four different tasks (extractive summarization, language modeling, concept detection, and paraphrase detection) both individually and in combination, with the goal of enhancing the target task of abstractive summarization via multitask learning. We show that for many task combinations, a model trained in a multitask setting outperforms a model trained only for abstractive summarization, with no additional summarization data introduced.…
Although domain shift has been well explored in many NLP applications, it still has received little attention in the domain of extractive text summarization. As a result, the model is under-utilizing the nature of the training data due to ignoring the difference in the distribution of training sets and shows poor generalization on the unseen domain. With the above limitation in mind, in this paper, we first extend the conventional definition of the domain from categories into data sources for the text summarization task. Then we re-purpose a multi-domain summarization dataset and verify how th…
Tokyo Metropolitan University（东京都立大学）；RIKEN（理化学研究所）；National Hospital Organization（国立医院机构）；Kitami Institute of Technology（北见工业大学）
Automated summarization of clinical texts can reduce the burden of medical professionals. "Discharge summaries" are one promising application of the summarization, because they can be generated from daily inpatient records. Our preliminary experiment suggests that 20-31% of the descriptions in discharge summaries overlap with the content of the inpatient records. However, it remains unclear how the summaries should be generated from the unstructured source. To decompose the physician's summarization process, this study aimed to identify the optimal granularity in summarization. We first define…
The majority of available text summarization datasets include short-form source documents that lack long-range causal and temporal dependencies, and often contain strong layout and stylistic biases. While relevant, such datasets will offer limited challenges for future generations of text summarization systems. We address these issues by introducing BookSum, a collection of datasets for long-form narrative summarization. Our dataset covers source documents from the literature domain, such as novels, plays and stories, and includes highly abstractive, human written summaries on three levels of …
Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学信息学院语言、认知与计算研究所）
Like humans, document summarization models can interpret a document's contents in a number of ways. Unfortunately, the neural models of today are largely black boxes that provide little explanation of how or why they generated a summary in the way they did. Therefore, to begin prying open the black box and to inject a level of control into the substance of the final summary, we developed a novel select-and-generate framework that focuses on explainability. By revealing the latent centrality and interactions between sentences, along with scores for sentence novelty and relevance, users are give…
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）；Microsoft（微软）；NEC Laboratories America（NEC美国实验室）
Text summarization has been a crucial problem in natural language processing (NLP) for several decades. It aims to condense lengthy documents into shorter versions while retaining the most critical information. Various methods have been proposed for text summarization, including extractive and abstractive summarization. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) like GPT3 and ChatGPT has recently created significant interest in using these models for text summarization tasks. Recent studies \cite{goyal2022news, zhang2023benchmarking} have shown that LLMs-generated news summaries are already…
Leipzig University（莱比锡大学）；University of Southern Denmark（南丹麦大学）
This paper introduces Summary Explorer, a new tool to support the manual inspection of text summarization systems by compiling the outputs of 55~state-of-the-art single document summarization approaches on three benchmark datasets, and visually exploring them during a qualitative assessment. The underlying design of the tool considers three well-known summary quality criteria (coverage, faithfulness, and position bias), encapsulated in a guided assessment based on tailored visualizations. The tool complements existing approaches for locally debugging summarization models and improves upon them…
Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University（复旦大学上海市智能信息处理重点实验室）；School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学技术学院）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Existing summarization systems mostly generate summaries purely relying on the content of the source document. However, even for humans, we usually need some references or exemplars to help us fully understand the source document and write summaries in a particular format. But how to find the high-quality exemplars and incorporate them into summarization systems is still challenging and worth exploring. In this paper, we propose RetrievalSum, a novel retrieval enhanced abstractive summarization framework consisting of a dense Retriever and a Summarizer. At first, several closely related exempl…
Shandong University（山东大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；KAUST（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；Ant Group（蚂蚁集团）
In a citation graph, adjacent paper nodes share related scientific terms and topics. The graph thus conveys unique structure information of document-level relatedness that can be utilized in the paper summarization task, for exploring beyond the intra-document information. In this work, we focus on leveraging citation graphs to improve scientific paper extractive summarization under different settings. We first propose a Multi-granularity Unsupervised Summarization model (MUS) as a simple and low-cost solution to the task. MUS finetunes a pre-trained encoder model on the citation graph by link…
This paper proposes a text summarization approach for factual reports using a deep learning model. This approach consists of three phases: feature extraction, feature enhancement, and summary generation, which work together to assimilate core information and generate a coherent, understandable summary. We are exploring various features to improve the set of sentences selected for the summary, and are using a Restricted Boltzmann Machine to enhance and abstract those features to improve resultant accuracy without losing any important information. The sentences are scored based on those enhanced…
Automatic text summarization tools help users in biomedical domain to acquire their intended information from various textual resources more efficiently. Some of the biomedical text summarization systems put the basis of their sentence selection approach on the frequency of concepts extracted from the input text. However, it seems that exploring other measures rather than the frequency for identifying the valuable content of the input document, and considering the correlations existing between concepts may be more useful for this type of summarization. In this paper, we describe a Bayesian sum…
Dialpad Canada Inc.（Dialpad加拿大公司）；Information Retrieval & Knowledge Management Research Lab, York University（约克大学信息检索与知识管理研究实验室）；School of Information Technology, York University（约克大学信息技术学院）
The Query Focused Text Summarization (QFTS) task aims at building systems that generate the summary of the text document(s) based on the given query. A key challenge in addressing this task is the lack of large labeled data for training the summarization model. In this paper, we address this challenge by exploring a series of domain adaptation techniques. Given the recent success of pre-trained transformer models in a wide range of natural language processing tasks, we utilize such models to generate abstractive summaries for the QFTS task for both single-document and multi-document scenarios.…
Middle East Technical University（中东技术大学）；Marmara University（马尔马拉大学）；Koç University（科奇大学）
Recent years have seen a proliferation of attention mechanisms and the rise of Transformers in Natural Language Generation (NLG). Previously, state-of-the-art NLG architectures such as RNN and LSTM ran into vanishing gradient problems; as sentences grew larger, distance between positions remained linear, and sequential computation hindered parallelization since sentences were processed word by word. Transformers usher in a new era. In this paper, we explore three major Transformer-based models, namely GPT, BERT, and XLNet, that carry significant implications for the field. NLG is a burgeoning …
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Current dialogue summarization systems usually encode the text with a number of general semantic features (e.g., keywords and topics) to gain more powerful dialogue modeling capabilities. However, these features are obtained via open-domain toolkits that are dialog-agnostic or heavily relied on human annotations. In this paper, we show how DialoGPT, a pre-trained model for conversational response generation, can be developed as an unsupervised dialogue annotator, which takes advantage of dialogue background knowledge encoded in DialoGPT. We apply DialoGPT to label three types of features on tw…
Mental health remains a significant challenge of public health worldwide. With increasing popularity of online platforms, many use the platforms to share their mental health conditions, express their feelings, and seek help from the community and counselors. Some of these platforms, such as Reachout, are dedicated forums where the users register to seek help. Others such as Reddit provide subreddits where the users publicly but anonymously post their mental health distress. Although posts are of varying length, it is beneficial to provide a short, but informative summary for fast processing by…
Query-focused summarization (QFS) aims to produce summaries that answer particular questions of interest, enabling greater user control and personalization. While recently released datasets, such as QMSum or AQuaMuSe, facilitate research efforts in QFS, the field lacks a comprehensive study of the broad space of applicable modeling methods. In this paper we conduct a systematic exploration of neural approaches to QFS, considering two general classes of methods: two-stage extractive-abstractive solutions and end-to-end models. Within those categories, we investigate existing models and explore …
We consider the unsupervised alignment of the full text of a book with a human-written summary. This presents challenges not seen in other text alignment problems, including a disparity in length and, consequent to this, a violation of the expectation that individual words and phrases should align, since large passages and chapters can be distilled into a single summary phrase. We present two new methods, based on hidden Markov models, specifically targeted to this problem, and demonstrate gains on an extractive book summarization task. While there is still much room for improvement, unsupervi…
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Data61 CSIRO（联邦科学与工业研究组织 Data61）
ROUGE is one of the first and most widely used evaluation metrics for text summarization. However, its assessment merely relies on surface similarities between peer and model summaries. Consequently, ROUGE is unable to fairly evaluate abstractive summaries including lexical variations and paraphrasing. Exploring the effectiveness of lexical resource-based models to address this issue, we adopt a graph-based algorithm into ROUGE to capture the semantic similarities between peer and model summaries. Our semantically motivated approach computes ROUGE scores based on both lexical and semantic simi…
Our analysis of large summarization datasets indicates that redundancy is a very serious problem when summarizing long documents. Yet, redundancy reduction has not been thoroughly investigated in neural summarization. In this work, we systematically explore and compare different ways to deal with redundancy when summarizing long documents. Specifically, we organize the existing methods into categories based on when and how the redundancy is considered. Then, in the context of these categories, we propose three additional methods balancing non-redundancy and importance in a general and flexible…
Williams College（威廉姆斯学院）；University of Colorado, Colorado Springs（科罗拉多大学科罗拉多斯普林斯分校）
Given vector representations for individual words, it is necessary to compute vector representations of sentences for many applications in a compositional manner, often using artificial neural networks. Relatively little work has explored the internal structure and properties of such sentence vectors. In this paper, we explore the properties of sentence vectors in the context of automatic summarization. In particular, we show that cosine similarity between sentence vectors and document vectors is strongly correlated with sentence importance and that vector semantics can identify and correct ga…
We introduce iFacetSum, a web application for exploring topical document sets. iFacetSum integrates interactive summarization together with faceted search, by providing a novel faceted navigation scheme that yields abstractive summaries for the user's selections. This approach offers both a comprehensive overview as well as concise details regarding subtopics of choice. Fine-grained facets are automatically produced based on cross-document coreference pipelines, rendering generic concepts, entities and statements surfacing in the source texts. We analyze the effectiveness of our application th…
Westlake University（西湖大学）；Westlake Institute for Advanced Study（西湖高等研究院）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
We report the results of DialogSum Challenge, the shared task on summarizing real-life scenario dialogues at INLG 2022. Four teams participate in this shared task and three submit their system reports, exploring different methods to improve the performance of dialogue summarization. Although there is a great improvement over the baseline models regarding automatic evaluation metrics, such as Rouge scores, we find that there is a salient gap between model generated outputs and human annotated summaries by human evaluation from multiple aspects. These findings demonstrate the difficulty of dialo…
Bloomberg（彭博社）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Stavanger（斯塔万格大学）
Tabular data provide answers to a significant portion of search queries. However, reciting an entire result table is impractical in conversational search systems. We propose to generate natural language summaries as answers to describe the complex information contained in a table. Through crowdsourcing experiments, we build a new conversation-oriented, open-domain table summarization dataset. It includes annotated table summaries, which not only answer questions but also help people explore other information in the table. We utilize this dataset to develop automatic table summarization systems…
Exploring the Efficacy of Large Language Models in Summarizing Mental Health Counseling Sessions: A Benchmark Study
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi（印度理工学院德里分校）；Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi（英德拉普拉斯塔信息技术学院）；YourDOST；All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Rishikesh（全印医学科学学院里希盖什分校）；All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi（全印医学科学学院新德里分校）
York University（约克大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Salesforce Research Asia（Salesforce亚洲研究院）
Charts are commonly used for exploring data and communicating insights. Generating natural language summaries from charts can be very helpful for people in inferring key insights that would otherwise require a lot of cognitive and perceptual efforts. We present Chart-to-text, a large-scale benchmark with two datasets and a total of 44,096 charts covering a wide range of topics and chart types. We explain the dataset construction process and analyze the datasets. We also introduce a number of state-of-the-art neural models as baselines that utilize image captioning and data-to-text generation t…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Indiana University（印第安纳大学）
Dialogue summarization has been extensively studied and applied, where the prior works mainly focused on exploring superior model structures to align the input dialogue and the output summary. However, for professional dialogues (e.g., legal debate and medical diagnosis), semantic/statistical alignment can hardly fill the logical/factual gap between input dialogue discourse and summary output with external knowledge. In this paper, we mainly investigate the factual inconsistency problem for Dialogue Inspectional Summarization (DIS) under non-pretraining and pretraining settings. An innovative …
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（矢量研究院）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
Understanding stories is a challenging reading comprehension problem for machines as it requires reading a large volume of text and following long-range dependencies. In this paper, we introduce the Shmoop Corpus: a dataset of 231 stories that are paired with detailed multi-paragraph summaries for each individual chapter (7,234 chapters), where the summary is chronologically aligned with respect to the story chapter. From the corpus, we construct a set of common NLP tasks, including Cloze-form question answering and a simplified form of abstractive summarization, as benchmarks for reading comp…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Yahoo Labs（雅虎实验室）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
We propose an abstraction-based multi-document summarization framework that can construct new sentences by exploring more fine-grained syntactic units than sentences, namely, noun/verb phrases. Different from existing abstraction-based approaches, our method first constructs a pool of concepts and facts represented by phrases from the input documents. Then new sentences are generated by selecting and merging informative phrases to maximize the salience of phrases and meanwhile satisfy the sentence construction constraints. We employ integer linear optimization for conducting phrase selection a…
Following each patient visit, physicians draft long semi-structured clinical summaries called SOAP notes. While invaluable to clinicians and researchers, creating digital SOAP notes is burdensome, contributing to physician burnout. In this paper, we introduce the first complete pipelines to leverage deep summarization models to generate these notes based on transcripts of conversations between physicians and patients. After exploring a spectrum of methods across the extractive-abstractive spectrum, we propose Cluster2Sent, an algorithm that (i) extracts important utterances relevant to each su…
