Despite some recent advances, automatic text summarization remains unreliable, elusive, and of limited practical use in applications. Two main problems with current summarization methods are well known: evaluation and factual consistency. To address these issues, we propose a new automatic reference-less text summarization evaluation system that can measure the quality of any text summarization model with a set of generated facts based on factual consistency, comprehensiveness, and compression rate. As far as we know, our evaluation system is the first system that measures the overarching quality of the text summarization models based on factuality, information coverage, and compression rate.
National Institute of Technology, Rourkela（鲁尔克拉国立技术学院）
In recent times, data is growing rapidly in every domain such as news, social media, banking, education, etc. Due to the excessiveness of data, there is a need of automatic summarizer which will be capable to summarize the data especially textual data in original document without losing any critical purposes. Text summarization is emerged as an important research area in recent past. In this regard, review of existing work on text summarization process is useful for carrying out further research. In this paper, recent literature on automatic keyword extraction and text summarization are presen…
Ecole nationale Supérieure d’Informatique (ESI, ex. INI)（阿尔及利亚阿尔及尔高等国立计算机学院（ESI，前身为INI））
Summaries are important when it comes to process huge amounts of information. Their most important benefit is saving time, which we do not have much nowadays. Therefore, a summary must be short, representative and readable. Generating summaries automatically can be beneficial for humans, since it can save time and help selecting relevant documents. Automatic summarization and, in particular, Automatic text summarization (ATS) is not a new research field; It was known since the 50s. Since then, researchers have been active to find the perfect summarization method. In this article, we will discu…
This paper proposes a novel Ontology-based and user-focused Automatic Text Summarization (OATS) system, in the setting where the goal is to automatically generate text summarization from unstructured text by extracting sentences containing the information that aligns to the user's focus. OATS consists of two modules: ontology-based topic identification and user-focused text summarization; it first utilizes an ontology-based approach to identify relevant documents to user's interest, and then takes advantage of the answers extracted from a question answering model using questions specified from…
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.
Automatic text summarization, the automated process of shortening a text while reserving the main ideas of the document(s), is a critical research area in natural language processing. The aim of this literature review is to survey the recent work on neural-based models in automatic text summarization. We examine in detail ten state-of-the-art neural-based summarizers: five abstractive models and five extractive models. In addition, we discuss the related techniques that can be applied to the summarization tasks and present promising paths for future research in neural-based summarization.
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…
Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS), LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学信息与语言处理中心（CIS））；Machine Intelligence, Siemens Healthineers, Princeton（西门子医疗 Princeton 机器智能部门）；Toyota Research Institute, Los Altos, California（丰田研究所）；Machine Intelligence, Siemens AG, Munich（西门子股份公司慕尼黑机器智能部门）
Interleaved texts, where posts belonging to different threads occur in a sequence, commonly occur in online chat posts, so that it can be time-consuming to quickly obtain an overview of the discussions. Existing systems first disentangle the posts by threads and then extract summaries from those threads. A major issue with such systems is error propagation from the disentanglement component. While end-to-end trainable summarization system could obviate explicit disentanglement, such systems require a large amount of labeled data. To address this, we propose to pretrain an end-to-end trainable …
The recent success of deep learning techniques for abstractive summarization is predicated on the availability of large-scale datasets. When summarizing reviews (e.g., for products or movies), such training data is neither available nor can be easily sourced, motivating the development of methods which rely on synthetic datasets for supervised training. We show that explicitly incorporating content planning in a summarization model not only yields output of higher quality, but also allows the creation of synthetic datasets which are more natural, resembling real world document-summary pairs. O…
The scarcity of comprehensive up-to-date studies on evaluation metrics for text summarization and the lack of consensus regarding evaluation protocols continue to inhibit progress. We address the existing shortcomings of summarization evaluation methods along five dimensions: 1) we re-evaluate 14 automatic evaluation metrics in a comprehensive and consistent fashion using neural summarization model outputs along with expert and crowd-sourced human annotations, 2) we consistently benchmark 23 recent summarization models using the aforementioned automatic evaluation metrics, 3) we assemble the l…
Text summarization is an NLP task which aims to convert a textual document into a shorter one while keeping as much meaning as possible. This pedagogical article reviews a number of recent Deep Learning architectures that have helped to advance research in this field. We will discuss in particular applications of pointer networks, hierarchical Transformers and Reinforcement Learning. We assume basic knowledge of Seq2Seq architecture and Transformer networks within NLP.
Manual Summarization of large bodies of text involves a lot of human effort and time, especially in the legal domain. Lawyers spend a lot of time preparing legal briefs of their clients' case files. Automatic Text summarization is a constantly evolving field of Natural Language Processing(NLP), which is a subdiscipline of the Artificial Intelligence Field. In this paper a hybrid method for automatic text summarization of legal cases using k-means clustering technique and tf-idf(term frequency-inverse document frequency) word vectorizer is proposed. The summary generated by the proposed method …
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
Despite significant progress, state-of-the-art abstractive summarization methods are still prone to hallucinate content inconsistent with the source document. In this paper, we propose Constrained Abstractive Summarization (CAS), a general setup that preserves the factual consistency of abstractive summarization by specifying tokens as constraints that must be present in the summary. We adopt lexically constrained decoding, a technique generally applicable to autoregressive generative models, to fulfill CAS and conduct experiments in two scenarios: (1) automatic summarization without human inv…
Recent pre-trained abstractive summarization systems have started to achieve credible performance, but a major barrier to their use in practice is their propensity to output summaries that are not faithful to the input and that contain factual errors. While a number of annotated datasets and statistical models for assessing factuality have been explored, there is no clear picture of what errors are most important to target or where current techniques are succeeding and failing. We explore both synthetic and human-labeled data sources for training models to identify factual errors in summarizat…
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.
Electronics Research Institute（电子研究所）；Benha University（班哈大学）
The development of methods to deal with the informative contents of the text units in the matching process is a major challenge in automatic summary evaluation systems that use fixed n-gram matching. The limitation causes inaccurate matching between units in a peer and reference summaries. The present study introduces a new Keyphrase based Summary Evaluator KpEval for evaluating automatic summaries. The KpEval relies on the keyphrases since they convey the most important concepts of a text. In the evaluation process, the keyphrases are used in their lemma form as the matching text unit. The sy…
Microsoft Cognitive Services Group（微软认知服务团队）；University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）
Automatic abstractive summaries are found to often distort or fabricate facts in the article. This inconsistency between summary and original text has seriously impacted its applicability. We propose a fact-aware summarization model FASum to extract and integrate factual relations into the summary generation process via graph attention. We then design a factual corrector model FC to automatically correct factual errors from summaries generated by existing systems. Empirical results show that the fact-aware summarization can produce abstractive summaries with higher factual consistency compared…
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 …
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Existing approaches to automatic summarization assume that a length limit for the summary is given, and view content selection as an optimization problem to maximize informativeness and minimize redundancy within this budget. This framework ignores the fact that human-written summaries have rich internal structure which can be exploited to train a summarization system. We present NEXTSUM, a novel approach to summarization based on a model that predicts the next sentence to include in the summary using not only the source article, but also the summary produced so far. We show that such a model …
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Automatic text summarization has enjoyed great progress over the years and is used in numerous applications, impacting the lives of many. Despite this development, there is little research that meaningfully investigates how the current research focus in automatic summarization aligns with users' needs. To bridge this gap, we propose a survey methodology that can be used to investigate the needs of users of automatically generated summaries. Importantly, these needs are dependent on the target group. Hence, we design our survey in such a way that it can be easily adjusted to investigate differe…
Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Tencent Cloud Xiaowei（腾讯云小微）
Extractive methods have been proven effective in automatic document summarization. Previous works perform this task by identifying informative contents at sentence level. However, it is unclear whether performing extraction at sentence level is the best solution. In this work, we show that unnecessity and redundancy issues exist when extracting full sentences, and extracting sub-sentential units is a promising alternative. Specifically, we propose extracting sub-sentential units based on the constituency parsing tree. A neural extractive model which leverages the sub-sentential information and…
Long documents such as academic articles and business reports have been the standard format to detail out important issues and complicated subjects that require extra attention. An automatic summarization system that can effectively condense long documents into short and concise texts to encapsulate the most important information would thus be significant in aiding the reader's comprehension. Recently, with the advent of neural architectures, significant research efforts have been made to advance automatic text summarization systems, and numerous studies on the challenges of extending these sy…
Laboratoire Informatique d’Avignon（阿维尼翁计算机实验室）；École Polytechnique de Montréal（蒙特利尔综合理工学院）
In Automatic Text Summarization, preprocessing is an important phase to reduce the space of textual representation. Classically, stemming and lemmatization have been widely used for normalizing words. However, even using normalization on large texts, the curse of dimensionality can disturb the performance of summarizers. This paper describes a new method for normalization of words to further reduce the space of representation. We propose to reduce each word to its initial letters, as a form of Ultra-stemming. The results show that Ultra-stemming not only preserve the content of summaries produ…
Northeastern University（东北大学）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）
We consider the problem of automatically generating a narrative biomedical evidence summary from multiple trial reports. We evaluate modern neural models for abstractive summarization of relevant article abstracts from systematic reviews previously conducted by members of the Cochrane collaboration, using the authors conclusions section of the review abstract as our target. We enlist medical professionals to evaluate generated summaries, and we find that modern summarization systems yield consistently fluent and relevant synopses, but that they are not always factual. We propose new approaches…
Automatic summarization of natural language is a current topic in computer science research and industry, studied for decades because of its usefulness across multiple domains. For example, summarization is necessary to create reviews such as this one. Research and applications have achieved some success in extractive summarization (where key sentences are curated), however, abstractive summarization (synthesis and re-stating) is a hard problem and generally unsolved in computer science. This literature review contrasts historical progress up through current state of the art, comparing dimensi…
Since the advent of the web, the amount of data on wen has been increased several million folds. In recent years web data generated is more than data stored for years. One important data format is text. To answer user queries over the internet, and to overcome the problem of information overload one possible solution is text document summarization. This not only reduces query access time, but also optimize the document results according to specific users requirements. Summarization of text document can be categorized as abstractive and extractive. Most of the work has been done in the directio…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Automatic text summarization has experienced substantial progress in recent years. With this progress, the question has arisen whether the types of summaries that are typically generated by automatic summarization models align with users' needs. Ter Hoeve et al (2020) answer this question negatively. Amongst others, they recommend focusing on generating summaries with more graphical elements. This is in line with what we know from the psycholinguistics literature about how humans process text. Motivated from these two angles, we propose a new task: summarization with graphical elements, and we…
University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；Institute of Bioinformatics（生物信息学研究所）
In recent years, there has been a explosion in the amount of text data from a variety of sources. This volume of text is an invaluable source of information and knowledge which needs to be effectively summarized to be useful. In this review, the main approaches to automatic text summarization are described. We review the different processes for summarization and describe the effectiveness and shortcomings of the different methods.
Ubiqus Labs（Ubiqus实验室）；LIUM – Le Mans Université（勒芒大学计算机科学实验室）；Université de Paris（巴黎大学）；LIA – Avignon Université（阿维尼翁大学计算机科学实验室）
Supervised approaches for Neural Abstractive Summarization require large annotated corpora that are costly to build. We present a French meeting summarization task where reports are predicted based on the automatic transcription of the meeting audio recordings. In order to build a corpus for this task, it is necessary to obtain the (automatic or manual) transcription of each meeting, and then to segment and align it with the corresponding manual report to produce training examples suitable for training. On the other hand, we have access to a very large amount of unaligned data, in particular r…
Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation（语言、认知与计算研究所）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Single document summarization is the task of producing a shorter version of a document while preserving its principal information content. In this paper we conceptualize extractive summarization as a sentence ranking task and propose a novel training algorithm which globally optimizes the ROUGE evaluation metric through a reinforcement learning objective. We use our algorithm to train a neural summarization model on the CNN and DailyMail datasets and demonstrate experimentally that it outperforms state-of-the-art extractive and abstractive systems when evaluated automatically and by humans.
Debate summarization is one of the novel and challenging research areas in automatic text summarization which has been largely unexplored. In this paper, we develop a debate summarization pipeline to summarize key topics which are discussed or argued in the two opposing sides of online debates. We view that the generation of debate summaries can be achieved by clustering, cluster labeling, and visualization. In our work, we investigate two different clustering approaches for the generation of the summaries. In the first approach, we generate the summaries by applying purely term-based clusteri…
With the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a growing urgency for medical community to keep up with the accelerating growth in the new coronavirus-related literature. As a result, the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge has released a corpus of scholarly articles and is calling for machine learning approaches to help bridging the gap between the researchers and the rapidly growing publications. Here, we take advantage of the recent advances in pre-trained NLP models, BERT and OpenAI GPT-2, to solve this challenge by performing text summarization on this dataset. We evaluate the results using ROU…
Saliency map generation techniques are at the forefront of explainable AI literature for a broad range of machine learning applications. Our goal is to question the limits of these approaches on more complex tasks. In this paper we apply Layer-Wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) to a sequence-to-sequence attention model trained on a text summarization dataset. We obtain unexpected saliency maps and discuss the rightfulness of these "explanations". We argue that we need a quantitative way of testing the counterfactual case to judge the truthfulness of the saliency maps. We suggest a protocol to ch…
Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；Aston University（阿斯顿大学）
Summarization is one of the key features of human intelligence. It plays an important role in understanding and representation. With rapid and continual expansion of texts, pictures and videos in cyberspace, automatic summarization becomes more and more desirable. Text summarization has been studied for over half century, but it is still hard to automatically generate a satisfied summary. Traditional methods process texts empirically and neglect the fundamental characteristics and principles of language use and understanding. This paper summarizes previous text summarization approaches in a mu…
This paper studies the problem of automatically extracting a short title from a manually written longer description of E-commerce products for display on mobile devices. It is a new extractive summarization problem on short text inputs, for which we propose a feature-enriched network model, combining three different categories of features in parallel. Experimental results show that our framework significantly outperforms several baselines by a substantial gain of 4.5%. Moreover, we produce an extractive summarization dataset for E-commerce short texts and will release it to the research commun…
Opinion summarization is the task of automatically generating summaries that encapsulate information from multiple user reviews. We present Semantic Autoencoder (SemAE) to perform extractive opinion summarization in an unsupervised manner. SemAE uses dictionary learning to implicitly capture semantic information from the review and learns a latent representation of each sentence over semantic units. A semantic unit is supposed to capture an abstract semantic concept. Our extractive summarization algorithm leverages the representations to identify representative opinions among hundreds of revie…
Vishwakarma Institute of Information Technology（维什瓦卡玛信息技术学院）
Document Summarization is the procedure of generating a meaningful and concise summary of a given document with the inclusion of relevant and topic-important points. There are two approaches: one is picking up the most relevant statements from the document itself and adding it to the Summary known as Extractive and the other is generating sentences for the Summary known as Abstractive Summarization. Training a machine learning model to perform tasks that are time-consuming or very difficult for humans to evaluate is a major challenge. Book Abstract generation is one of such complex tasks. Trad…
New York University（纽约大学）；Facebook AI（Facebook人工智能）
Practical applications of abstractive summarization models are limited by frequent factual inconsistencies with respect to their input. Existing automatic evaluation metrics for summarization are largely insensitive to such errors. We propose an automatic evaluation protocol called QAGS (pronounced "kags") that is designed to identify factual inconsistencies in a generated summary. QAGS is based on the intuition that if we ask questions about a summary and its source, we will receive similar answers if the summary is factually consistent with the source. To evaluate QAGS, we collect human judg…
A comprehensive review of automatic text summarization techniques: method, data, evaluation and coding
Universidade de Brasília（巴西利亚大学）；Nacional Institute of Science and Technology for Complex Systems（国家复杂系统科学技术研究所）；Instituto Federal de Minas Gerais（米纳斯吉拉斯联邦学院）
We develop models and extract relevant features for automatic text summarization and investigate the performance of different models on the DUC 2001 dataset. Two different models were developed, one being a ridge regressor and the other one was a multi-layer perceptron. The hyperparameters were varied and their performance were noted. We segregated the summarization task into 2 main steps, the first being sentence ranking and the second step being sentence selection. In the first step, given a document, we sort the sentences based on their Importance, and in the second step, in order to obtain…
In text summarization, evaluating the efficacy of automatic metrics without human judgments has become recently popular. One exemplar work concludes that automatic metrics strongly disagree when ranking high-scoring summaries. In this paper, we revisit their experiments and find that their observations stem from the fact that metrics disagree in ranking summaries from any narrow scoring range. We hypothesize that this may be because summaries are similar to each other in a narrow scoring range and are thus, difficult to rank. Apart from the width of the scoring range of summaries, we analyze t…
Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Elder Research, Inc.（埃尔德研究公司）；Clarkson University（克拉克森大学）
The rapid growth of text data has motivated the development of machine-learning based automatic text summarization strategies that concisely capture the essential ideas in a larger text. This study aimed to devise an extractive summarization method for A-133 Single Audits, which assess if recipients of federal grants are compliant with program requirements for use of federal funding. Currently, these voluminous audits must be manually analyzed by officials for oversight, risk management, and prioritization purposes. Automated summarization has the potential to streamline these processes. Analy…
One of the most pressing issues that have arisen due to the rapid growth of the Internet is known as information overloading. Simplifying the relevant information in the form of a summary will assist many people because the material on any topic is plentiful on the Internet. Manually summarising massive amounts of text is quite challenging for humans. So, it has increased the need for more complex and powerful summarizers. Researchers have been trying to improve approaches for creating summaries since the 1950s, such that the machine-generated summary matches the human-created summary. This st…
Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院理论物理研究所）
For a graph formed by vertices and weighted edges, a generalized minimum dominating set (MDS) is a vertex set of smallest cardinality such that the summed weight of edges from each outside vertex to vertices in this set is equal to or larger than certain threshold value. This generalized MDS problem reduces to the conventional MDS problem in the limiting case of all the edge weights being equal to the threshold value. We treat the generalized MDS problem in the present paper by a replica-symmetric spin glass theory and derive a set of belief-propagation equations. As a practical application we…
INESC-ID（里斯本系统与计算机工程研究所）；Instituto Superior Técnico（高等技术学院）；Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学）；Instituto de Telecomunicações（电信研究所）
The task of automatic text summarization produces a concise and fluent text summary while preserving key information and overall meaning. Recent approaches to document-level summarization have seen significant improvements in recent years by using models based on the Transformer architecture. However, the quadratic memory and time complexities with respect to the sequence length make them very expensive to use, especially with long sequences, as required by document-level summarization. Our work addresses the problem of document-level summarization by studying how efficient Transformer techniq…
Text summarization is a process to produce an abstract or a summary by selecting significant portion of the information from one or more texts. In an automatic text summarization process, a text is given to the computer and the computer returns a shorter less redundant extract or abstract of the original text(s). Many techniques have been developed for summarizing English text(s). But, a very few attempts have been made for Bengali text summarization. This paper presents a method for Bengali text summarization which extracts important sentences from a Bengali document to produce a summary.
The amount of user generated contents from various social medias allows analyst to handle a wide view of conversations on several topics related to their business. Nevertheless keeping up-to-date with this amount of information is not humanly feasible. Automatic Summarization then provides an interesting mean to digest the dynamics and the mass volume of contents. In this paper, we address the issue of tweets summarization which remains scarcely explored. We propose to automatically generated summaries of Micro-Blogs conversations dealing with public figures E-Reputation. These summaries are g…
This paper aims to introduces a new algorithm for automatic speech-to-text summarization based on statistical divergences of probabilities and graphs. The input is a text from speech conversations with noise, and the output a compact text summary. Our results, on the pilot task CCCS Multiling 2015 French corpus are very encouraging
The technology of automatic document summarization is maturing and may provide a solution to the information overload problem. Nowadays, document summarization plays an important role in information retrieval. With a large volume of documents, presenting the user with a summary of each document greatly facilitates the task of finding the desired documents. Document summarization is a process of automatically creating a compressed version of a given document that provides useful information to users, and multi-document summarization is to produce a summary delivering the majority of information…
São Paulo State University - UNESP（圣保罗州立大学（UNESP））
Automatic Text Summarization (ATS) is becoming relevant with the growth of textual data; however, with the popularization of public large-scale datasets, some recent machine learning approaches have focused on dense models and architectures that, despite producing notable results, usually turn out in models difficult to interpret. Given the challenge behind interpretable learning-based text summarization and the importance it may have for evolving the current state of the ATS field, this work studies the application of two modern Generalized Additive Models with interactions, namely Explainabl…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）；University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学）
Twitter is currently a popular online social media platform which allows users to share their user-generated content. This publicly-generated user data is also crucial to healthcare technologies because the discovered patterns would hugely benefit them in several ways. One of the applications is in automatically discovering mental health problems, e.g., depression. Previous studies to automatically detect a depressed user on online social media have largely relied upon the user behaviour and their linguistic patterns including user's social interactions. The downside is that these models are t…
