Extractive Summarization as Text Matching

Ming Zhong, Pengfei Liu, Yiran Chen, Danqing Wang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang


Abstract
This paper creates a paradigm shift with regard to the way we build neural extractive summarization systems. Instead of following the commonly used framework of extracting sentences individually and modeling the relationship between sentences, we formulate the extractive summarization task as a semantic text matching problem, in which a source document and candidate summaries will be (extracted from the original text) matched in a semantic space. Notably, this paradigm shift to semantic matching framework is well-grounded in our comprehensive analysis of the inherent gap between sentence-level and summary-level extractors based on the property of the dataset. Besides, even instantiating the framework with a simple form of a matching model, we have driven the state-of-the-art extractive result on CNN/DailyMail to a new level (44.41 in ROUGE-1). Experiments on the other five datasets also show the effectiveness of the matching framework. We believe the power of this matching-based summarization framework has not been fully exploited. To encourage more instantiations in the future, we have released our codes, processed dataset, as well as generated summaries in https://github.com/maszhongming/MatchSum.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.552
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6197–6208
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.552
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.552
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ming Zhong, Pengfei Liu, Yiran Chen, Danqing Wang, Xipeng Qiu, and Xuanjing Huang. 2020. Extractive Summarization as Text Matching. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 6197–6208, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Extractive Summarization as Text Matching (Zhong et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.552.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929382
Code
 maszhongming/MatchSum +  additional community code
Data
CNN/Daily MailMulti-NewsPubmedRedditReddit TIFUWikiHow