A Variational Hierarchical Model for Neural Cross-Lingual Summarization

Yunlong Liang, Fandong Meng, Chulun Zhou, Jinan Xu, Yufeng Chen, Jinsong Su, Jie Zhou


Abstract
The goal of the cross-lingual summarization (CLS) is to convert a document in one language (e.g., English) to a summary in another one (e.g., Chinese). The CLS task is essentially the combination of machine translation (MT) and monolingual summarization (MS), and thus there exists the hierarchical relationship between MT&MS and CLS. Existing studies on CLS mainly focus on utilizing pipeline methods or jointly training an end-to-end model through an auxiliary MT or MS objective. However, it is very challenging for the model to directly conduct CLS as it requires both the abilities to translate and summarize. To address this issue, we propose a hierarchical model for the CLS task, based on the conditional variational auto-encoder. The hierarchical model contains two kinds of latent variables at the local and global levels, respectively. At the local level, there are two latent variables, one for translation and the other for summarization. As for the global level, there is another latent variable for cross-lingual summarization conditioned on the two local-level variables. Experiments on two language directions (English-Chinese) verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach. In addition, we show that our model is able to generate better cross-lingual summaries than comparison models in the few-shot setting.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.148
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2088–2099
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.148
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.148
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yunlong Liang, Fandong Meng, Chulun Zhou, Jinan Xu, Yufeng Chen, Jinsong Su, and Jie Zhou. 2022. A Variational Hierarchical Model for Neural Cross-Lingual Summarization. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2088–2099, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Variational Hierarchical Model for Neural Cross-Lingual Summarization (Liang et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.148.pdf
Software:
 2022.acl-long.148.software.zip
Code
 xl2248/vhm
Data
LCSTS