Summarize, Outline, and Elaborate: Long-Text Generation via Hierarchical Supervision from Extractive Summaries

Xiaofei Sun, Zijun Sun, Yuxian Meng, Jiwei Li, Chun Fan


Abstract
The difficulty of generating coherent long texts lies in the fact that existing models overwhelmingly focus on the tasks of local word prediction, and cannot make high level plans on what to generate or capture the high-level discourse dependencies between chunks of texts. Inspired by how humans write, where a list of bullet points or a catalog is first outlined, and then each bullet point is expanded to form the whole article, we propose SOE, a pipelined system that involves of summarizing, outlining and elaborating for long text generation: the model first outlines the summaries for different segments of long texts, and then elaborates on each bullet point to generate the corresponding segment. To avoid the labor-intensive process of summary soliciting, we propose the reconstruction strategy, which extracts segment summaries in an unsupervised manner by selecting its most informative part to reconstruct the segment. The proposed generation system comes with the following merits: (1) the summary provides high-level guidance for text generation and avoids the local minimum of individual word predictions; (2) the high-level discourse dependencies are captured in the conditional dependencies between summaries and are preserved during the summary expansion process and (3) additionally, we are able to consider significantly more contexts by representing contexts as concise summaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SOE produces long texts with significantly better quality, along with faster convergence speed.
Anthology ID:
2022.coling-1.556
Volume:
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Chu-Ren Huang, Hansaem Kim, James Pustejovsky, Leo Wanner, Key-Sun Choi, Pum-Mo Ryu, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Lucia Donatelli, Heng Ji, Sadao Kurohashi, Patrizia Paggio, Nianwen Xue, Seokhwan Kim, Younggyun Hahm, Zhong He, Tony Kyungil Lee, Enrico Santus, Francis Bond, Seung-Hoon Na
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6392–6402
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.556
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaofei Sun, Zijun Sun, Yuxian Meng, Jiwei Li, and Chun Fan. 2022. Summarize, Outline, and Elaborate: Long-Text Generation via Hierarchical Supervision from Extractive Summaries. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6392–6402, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Summarize, Outline, and Elaborate: Long-Text Generation via Hierarchical Supervision from Extractive Summaries (Sun et al., COLING 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.556.pdf
Data
BookCorpusWikiText-103WikiText-2WritingPrompts