Decision-Focused Summarization

Chao-Chun Hsu, Chenhao Tan


Abstract
Relevance in summarization is typically de- fined based on textual information alone, without incorporating insights about a particular decision. As a result, to support risk analysis of pancreatic cancer, summaries of medical notes may include irrelevant information such as a knee injury. We propose a novel problem, decision-focused summarization, where the goal is to summarize relevant information for a decision. We leverage a predictive model that makes the decision based on the full text to provide valuable insights on how a decision can be inferred from text. To build a summary, we then select representative sentences that lead to similar model decisions as using the full text while accounting for textual non-redundancy. To evaluate our method (DecSum), we build a testbed where the task is to summarize the first ten reviews of a restaurant in support of predicting its future rating on Yelp. DecSum substantially outperforms text-only summarization methods and model-based explanation methods in decision faithfulness and representativeness. We further demonstrate that DecSum is the only method that enables humans to outperform random chance in predicting which restaurant will be better rated in the future.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
117–132
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.10
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.10
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chao-Chun Hsu and Chenhao Tan. 2021. Decision-Focused Summarization. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 117–132, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Decision-Focused Summarization (Hsu & Tan, EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.10.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.10.mp4
Code
 chicagohai/decsum