Summarizing Text on Any Aspects: A Knowledge-Informed Weakly-Supervised Approach

Bowen Tan, Lianhui Qin, Eric Xing, Zhiting Hu


Abstract
Given a document and a target aspect (e.g., a topic of interest), aspect-based abstractive summarization attempts to generate a summary with respect to the aspect. Previous studies usually assume a small pre-defined set of aspects and fall short of summarizing on other diverse topics. In this work, we study summarizing on arbitrary aspects relevant to the document, which significantly expands the application of the task in practice. Due to the lack of supervision data, we develop a new weak supervision construction method and an aspect modeling scheme, both of which integrate rich external knowledge sources such as ConceptNet and Wikipedia. Experiments show our approach achieves performance boosts on summarizing both real and synthetic documents given pre-defined or arbitrary aspects.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.510
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:
6301–6309
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.510
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.510
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bowen Tan, Lianhui Qin, Eric Xing, and Zhiting Hu. 2020. Summarizing Text on Any Aspects: A Knowledge-Informed Weakly-Supervised Approach. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 6301–6309, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Summarizing Text on Any Aspects: A Knowledge-Informed Weakly-Supervised Approach (Tan et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.510.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939371
Code
 tanyuqian/aspect-based-summarization
Data
CNN/Daily MailConceptNet