Enhancing Factual Consistency of Abstractive Summarization

Chenguang Zhu, William Hinthorn, Ruochen Xu, Qingkai Zeng, Michael Zeng, Xuedong Huang, Meng Jiang


Abstract
Automatic abstractive summaries are found to often distort or fabricate facts in the article. This inconsistency between summary and original text has seriously impacted its applicability. We propose a fact-aware summarization model FASum to extract and integrate factual relations into the summary generation process via graph attention. We then design a factual corrector model FC to automatically correct factual errors from summaries generated by existing systems. Empirical results show that the fact-aware summarization can produce abstractive summaries with higher factual consistency compared with existing systems, and the correction model improves the factual consistency of given summaries via modifying only a few keywords.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.58
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
718–733
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.58
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.58
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chenguang Zhu, William Hinthorn, Ruochen Xu, Qingkai Zeng, Michael Zeng, Xuedong Huang, and Meng Jiang. 2021. Enhancing Factual Consistency of Abstractive Summarization. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 718–733, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Factual Consistency of Abstractive Summarization (Zhu et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.58.pdf
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 2021.naacl-main.58.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.58.mp4