Divide and Conquer: From Complexity to Simplicity for Lay Summarization

Rochana Chaturvedi, Saachi, Jaspreet Singh Dhani, Anurag Joshi, Ankush Khanna, Neha Tomar, Swagata Duari, Alka Khurana, Vasudha Bhatnagar


Abstract
We describe our approach for the 1st Computational Linguistics Lay Summary Shared Task CL-LaySumm20. The task is to produce non-technical summaries of scholarly documents. The summary should be within easy grasp of a layman who may not be well versed with the domain of the research article. We propose a two step divide-and-conquer approach. First, we judiciously select segments of the documents that are not overly pedantic and are likely to be of interest to the laity, and over-extract sentences from each segment using an unsupervised network based method. Next, we perform abstractive summarization on these extractions and systematically merge the abstractions. We run ablation studies to establish that each step in our pipeline is critical for improvement in the quality of lay summary. Our approach leverages state-of-the-art pre-trained deep neural network based models as zero-shot learners to achieve high scores on the task.
Anthology ID:
2020.sdp-1.40
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Muthu Kumar Chandrasekaran, Anita de Waard, Guy Feigenblat, Dayne Freitag, Tirthankar Ghosal, Eduard Hovy, Petr Knoth, David Konopnicki, Philipp Mayr, Robert M. Patton, Michal Shmueli-Scheuer
Venue:
sdp
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
344–355
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sdp-1.40
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.sdp-1.40
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rochana Chaturvedi, Saachi, Jaspreet Singh Dhani, Anurag Joshi, Ankush Khanna, Neha Tomar, Swagata Duari, Alka Khurana, and Vasudha Bhatnagar. 2020. Divide and Conquer: From Complexity to Simplicity for Lay Summarization. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing, pages 344–355, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Divide and Conquer: From Complexity to Simplicity for Lay Summarization (Chaturvedi et al., sdp 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sdp-1.40.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2020.sdp-1.40.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
Code
 anuragjoshi3519/laysumm20