Summarizing texts is not a straightforward task. Before even considering text summarization, one should determine what kind of summary is expected. How much should the information be compressed? Is it relevant to reformulate or should the summary stick to the original phrasing? State-of-the-art on automatic text summarization mostly revolves around news articles. We suggest that considering a wider variety of tasks would lead to an improvement in the field, in terms of generalization and robustness. We explore meeting summarization: generating reports from automatic transcriptions. Our work consists in segmenting and aligning transcriptions with respect to reports, to get a suitable dataset for neural summarization. Using a bootstrapping approach, we provide pre-alignments that are corrected by human annotators, making a validation set against which we evaluate automatic models. This consistently reduces annotators' efforts by providing iteratively better pre-alignment and maximizes the corpus size by using annotations from our automatic alignment models. Evaluation is conducted on \publicmeetings, a novel corpus of aligned public meetings. We report automatic alignment and summarization performances on this corpus and show that automatic alignment is relevant for data annotation since it leads to large improvement of almost +4 on all ROUGE scores on the summarization task.
Research Training Group AIPHES；UKP Lab Computer Science Department, Technische Universit \"a t Darmstadt www.aiphes.tu-darmstadt.de, www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de
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…
Neural network-based models augmented with unsupervised pre-trained knowledge have achieved impressive performance on text summarization. However, most existing evaluation methods are limited to an in-domain setting, where summarizers are trained and evaluated on the same dataset. We argue that this approach can narrow our understanding of the generalization ability for different summarization systems. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of characteristics of different datasets and investigate the performance of different summarization models under a cross-dataset setting, in which …
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…
APPSI-139: A Parallel Corpus of English Application Privacy Policy Summarization and Interpretation
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；North University of China（北方工业大学）；Institute of Science Tokyo（东京科学研究所）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Hangzhou High-Tech Zone (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security（杭州高新技术区（滨江）区块链与数据安全研究院）
Bloomberg（彭博）；IIIT-Delhi（德里印度理工学院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Code-switching is the communication phenomenon where speakers switch between different languages during a conversation. With the widespread adoption of conversational agents and chat platforms, code-switching has become an integral part of written conversations in many multi-lingual communities worldwide. This makes it essential to develop techniques for summarizing and understanding these conversations. Towards this objective, we introduce abstractive summarization of Hindi-English code-switched conversations and develop the first code-switched conversation summarization dataset - GupShup, wh…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Microsoft Cognitive Services Research（微软认知服务研究院）
Meetings are a key component of human collaboration. As increasing numbers of meetings are recorded and transcribed, meeting summaries have become essential to remind those who may or may not have attended the meetings about the key decisions made and the tasks to be completed. However, it is hard to create a single short summary that covers all the content of a long meeting involving multiple people and topics. In order to satisfy the needs of different types of users, we define a new query-based multi-domain meeting summarization task, where models have to select and summarize relevant spans…
COSMMIC: Comment-Sensitive Multimodal Multilingual Indian Corpus for Summarization and Headline Generation
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India（印度理工学院帕纳分校计算机科学与工程系）；Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli, India（印度理工学院 Tiruchirappalli 金属与材料工程系）；Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, BITS Pilani – Goa Campus, India（比斯·帕尼学院 Goa 分校计算机科学与信息系统系）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Information Technology Vadodara, India（印度信息科技学院瓦达拉分校计算机科学与工程系）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, B.M.S. College of Engineering, Bangalore, India（班加罗尔 B.M.S. 工程学院计算机科学与工程系）；Université de Toulouse, IRIT UMR 5505 CNRS, France（图卢兹大学 IRIT UMR 5505 CNRS 实验室）
IIT Kharagpur（印度理工学院克勒格布尔分校）；Goldman Sachs（高盛集团）；Leibniz University of Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）
Despite tremendous progress in automatic summarization, state-of-the-art methods are predominantly trained to excel in summarizing short newswire articles, or documents with strong layout biases such as scientific articles or government reports. Efficient techniques to summarize financial documents, including facts and figures, have largely been unexplored, majorly due to the unavailability of suitable datasets. In this work, we present ECTSum, a new dataset with transcripts of earnings calls (ECTs), hosted by publicly traded companies, as documents, and short experts-written telegram-style bu…
University of Massachusetts, Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；IIIT-Delhi（德里印度理工学院）
Multi-document summarization (MDS) is the task of reflecting key points from any set of documents into a concise text paragraph. In the past, it has been used to aggregate news, tweets, product reviews, etc. from various sources. Owing to no standard definition of the task, we encounter a plethora of datasets with varying levels of overlap and conflict between participating documents. There is also no standard regarding what constitutes summary information in MDS. Adding to the challenge is the fact that new systems report results on a set of chosen datasets, which might not correlate with the…
Experience and Evidence are the eyes of an excellent summarizer! Towards Knowledge Infused Multi-modal Clinical Conversation Summarization
Indian Institute of Technology, Patna（印度理工学院巴特那分校）；Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）；All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Rishikesh（全印医学科学学院瑞诗凯诗分院）
School of Electrical and Computing Engineering, UNICAMP（坎皮纳斯州立大学电气与计算机工程学院）；NeuralMind Inteligência Artificial（NeuralMind 人工智能（公司））；David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学大卫·R·谢里顿计算机科学学院）
What are the latent questions on some textual data? In this work, we investigate using question generation models for exploring a collection of documents. Our method, dubbed corpus2question, consists of applying a pre-trained question generation model over a corpus and aggregating the resulting questions by frequency and time. This technique is an alternative to methods such as topic modelling and word cloud for summarizing large amounts of textual data. Results show that applying corpus2question on a corpus of scientific articles related to COVID-19 yields relevant questions about the topic. …
Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) is the task to produce a summary in one particular language for a source document in a different language. We introduce WikiMulti - a new dataset for cross-lingual summarization based on Wikipedia articles in 15 languages. As a set of baselines for further studies, we evaluate the performance of existing cross-lingual abstractive summarization methods on our dataset. We make our dataset publicly available here: https://github.com/tikhonovpavel/wikimulti
Automatic summarization is the process of shortening a set of textual data computationally, to create a subset (a summary) that represents the most important pieces of information in the original text. Existing summarization methods can be roughly divided into two types: extractive and abstractive. An extractive summarizer explicitly selects text snippets (words, phrases, sentences, etc.) from the source document, while an abstractive summarizer generates novel text snippets to convey the most salient concepts prevalent in the source.
Information overloading requires the need for summarizers to extract salient information from the text. Currently, there is an overload of dialogue data due to the rise of virtual communication platforms. The rise of Covid-19 has led people to rely on online communication platforms like Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, etc. to conduct their company meetings. Instead of going through the entire meeting transcripts, people can use meeting summarizers to select useful data. Nevertheless, there is a lack of comprehensive surveys in the field of meeting summarizers. In this survey, we aim to …
Dialogue summarization is a challenging problem due to the informal and unstructured nature of conversational data. Recent advances in abstractive summarization have been focused on data-hungry neural models and adapting these models to a new domain requires the availability of domain-specific manually annotated corpus created by linguistic experts. We propose a zero-shot abstractive dialogue summarization method that uses discourse relations to provide structure to conversations, and then uses an out-of-the-box document summarization model to create final summaries. Experiments on the AMI and…
Revisiting Cross-Lingual Summarization: A Corpus-based Study and A New Benchmark with Improved Annotation
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；UIUC（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Sichuan Lan-bridge Information Technology Co., Ltd.（四川语言桥信息技术有限公司）；Westlake Institute for Advanced Study（西湖高等研究院）
Neural abstractive summarization methods often require large quantities of labeled training data. However, labeling large amounts of summarization data is often prohibitive due to time, financial, and expertise constraints, which has limited the usefulness of summarization systems to practical applications. In this paper, we argue that this limitation can be overcome by a semi-supervised approach: consistency training which is to leverage large amounts of unlabeled data to improve the performance of supervised learning over a small corpus. The consistency regularization semi-supervised learnin…
University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
We present implementation details of our abstractive summarizers that achieve competitive results on the Podcast Summarization task of TREC 2020. A concise textual summary that captures important information is crucial for users to decide whether to listen to the podcast. Prior work focuses primarily on learning contextualized representations. Instead, we investigate several less-studied aspects of neural abstractive summarization, including (i) the importance of selecting important segments from transcripts to serve as input to the summarizer; (ii) striking a balance between the amount and qu…
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…
Automatic meeting summarization is becoming increasingly popular these days. The ability to automatically summarize meetings and to extract key information could greatly increase the efficiency of our work and life. In this paper, we experiment with different approaches to improve the performance of query-based meeting summarization. We started with HMNet\cite{hmnet}, a hierarchical network that employs both a word-level transformer and a turn-level transformer, as the baseline. We explore the effectiveness of pre-training the model with a large news-summarization dataset. We investigate addin…
Westlake University（西湖大学）；Westlake Institute for Advanced Study（西湖高等研究院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Tencent SPPD（腾讯可持续社会价值事业部）
Deep learning has led to significant improvement in text summarization with various methods investigated and improved ROUGE scores reported over the years. However, gaps still exist between summaries produced by automatic summarizers and human professionals. Aiming to gain more understanding of summarization systems with respect to their strengths and limits on a fine-grained syntactic and semantic level, we consult the Multidimensional Quality Metric(MQM) and quantify 8 major sources of errors on 10 representative summarization models manually. Primarily, we find that 1) under similar setting…
While automatic summarization evaluation methods developed for English are routinely applied to other languages, this is the first attempt to systematically quantify their panlinguistic efficacy. We take a summarization corpus for eight different languages, and manually annotate generated summaries for focus (precision) and coverage (recall). Based on this, we evaluate 19 summarization evaluation metrics, and find that using multilingual BERT within BERTScore performs well across all languages, at a level above that for English.
In this paper, we exploit the innate document segment structure for improving the extractive summarization task. We build two text segmentation models and find the most optimal strategy to introduce their output predictions in an extractive summarization model. Experimental results on a corpus of scientific articles show that extractive summarization benefits from using a highly accurate segmentation method. In particular, most of the improvement is in documents where the most relevant information is not at the beginning thus, we conclude that segmentation helps in reducing the lead bias probl…
