BASS: Boosting Abstractive Summarization with Unified Semantic Graph

Wenhao Wu, Wei Li, Xinyan Xiao, Jiachen Liu, Ziqiang Cao, Sujian Li, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang


Abstract
Abstractive summarization for long-document or multi-document remains challenging for the Seq2Seq architecture, as Seq2Seq is not good at analyzing long-distance relations in text. In this paper, we present BASS, a novel framework for Boosting Abstractive Summarization based on a unified Semantic graph, which aggregates co-referent phrases distributing across a long range of context and conveys rich relations between phrases. Further, a graph-based encoder-decoder model is proposed to improve both the document representation and summary generation process by leveraging the graph structure. Specifically, several graph augmentation methods are designed to encode both the explicit and implicit relations in the text while the graph-propagation attention mechanism is developed in the decoder to select salient content into the summary. Empirical results show that the proposed architecture brings substantial improvements for both long-document and multi-document summarization tasks.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.472
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6052–6067
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.472
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.472
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenhao Wu, Wei Li, Xinyan Xiao, Jiachen Liu, Ziqiang Cao, Sujian Li, Hua Wu, and Haifeng Wang. 2021. BASS: Boosting Abstractive Summarization with Unified Semantic Graph. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6052–6067, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
BASS: Boosting Abstractive Summarization with Unified Semantic Graph (Wu et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.472.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.472.mp4
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