Learning to Fuse Sentences with Transformers for Summarization

Logan Lebanoff, Franck Dernoncourt, Doo Soon Kim, Lidan Wang, Walter Chang, Fei Liu


Abstract
The ability to fuse sentences is highly attractive for summarization systems because it is an essential step to produce succinct abstracts. However, to date, summarizers can fail on fusing sentences. They tend to produce few summary sentences by fusion or generate incorrect fusions that lead the summary to fail to retain the original meaning. In this paper, we explore the ability of Transformers to fuse sentences and propose novel algorithms to enhance their ability to perform sentence fusion by leveraging the knowledge of points of correspondence between sentences. Through extensive experiments, we investigate the effects of different design choices on Transformer’s performance. Our findings highlight the importance of modeling points of correspondence between sentences for effective sentence fusion.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.338
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4136–4142
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.338
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.338
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Logan Lebanoff, Franck Dernoncourt, Doo Soon Kim, Lidan Wang, Walter Chang, and Fei Liu. 2020. Learning to Fuse Sentences with Transformers for Summarization. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 4136–4142, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Fuse Sentences with Transformers for Summarization (Lebanoff et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.338.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939343
Code
 ucfnlp/sent-fusion-transformers
Data
PoC