Focus on the Action: Learning to Highlight and Summarize Jointly for Email To-Do Items Summarization

Kexun Zhang, Jiaao Chen, Diyi Yang


Abstract
Automatic email to-do item generation is the task of generating to-do items from a given email to help people overview emails and schedule daily work. Different from prior research on email summarization, to-do item generation focuses on generating action mentions to provide more structured summaries of email text. Prior work either requires large amount of annotation for key sentences with potential actions or fails to pay attention to nuanced actions from these unstructured emails, and thus often lead to unfaithful summaries. To fill these gaps, we propose a simple and effective learning to highlight and summarize framework (LHS) to learn to identify the most salient text and actions, and incorporate these structured representations to generate more faithful to-do items. Experiments show that our LHS model outperforms the baselines and achieves the state-of-the-art performance in terms of both quantitative evaluation and human judgement. We also discussed specific challenges that current models faced with email to-do summarization.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-acl.323
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4095–4106
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-acl.323
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-acl.323
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kexun Zhang, Jiaao Chen, and Diyi Yang. 2022. Focus on the Action: Learning to Highlight and Summarize Jointly for Email To-Do Items Summarization. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022, pages 4095–4106, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Focus on the Action: Learning to Highlight and Summarize Jointly for Email To-Do Items Summarization (Zhang et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-acl.323.pdf