Unsupervised Class-Specific Abstractive Summarization of Customer Reviews

Thi Nhat Anh Nguyen, Mingwei Shen, Karen Hovsepian


Abstract
Large-scale unsupervised abstractive summarization is sorely needed to automatically scan millions of customer reviews in today’s fast-paced e-commerce landscape. We address a key challenge in unsupervised abstractive summarization – reducing generic and uninformative content and producing useful information that relates to specific product aspects. To do so, we propose to model reviews in the context of some topical classes of interest. In particular, for any arbitrary set of topical classes of interest, the proposed model can learn to generate a set of class-specific summaries from multiple reviews of each product without ground-truth summaries, and the only required signal is class probabilities or class label for each review. The model combines a generative variational autoencoder, with an integrated class-correlation gating mechanism and a hierarchical structure capturing dependence among products, reviews and classes. Human evaluation shows that generated summaries are highly relevant, fluent, and representative. Evaluation using a reference dataset shows that our model outperforms state-of-the-art abstractive and extractive baselines.
Anthology ID:
2021.ecnlp-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Shervin Malmasi, Surya Kallumadi, Nicola Ueffing, Oleg Rokhlenko, Eugene Agichtein, Ido Guy
Venue:
ECNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
88–100
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.ecnlp-1.11
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.ecnlp-1.11
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Thi Nhat Anh Nguyen, Mingwei Shen, and Karen Hovsepian. 2021. Unsupervised Class-Specific Abstractive Summarization of Customer Reviews. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP, pages 88–100, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unsupervised Class-Specific Abstractive Summarization of Customer Reviews (Nguyen et al., ECNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.ecnlp-1.11.pdf