From spoken dialogue to formal summary: An utterance rewriting for dialogue summarization

Yue Fang, Hainan Zhang, Hongshen Chen, Zhuoye Ding, Bo Long, Yanyan Lan, Yanquan Zhou


Abstract
Due to the dialogue characteristics of unstructured contexts and multi-parties with first-person perspective, many successful text summarization works have failed when dealing with dialogue summarization. In dialogue summarization task, the input dialogue is usually spoken style with ellipsis and co-references but the output summaries are more formal and complete. Therefore, the dialogue summarization model should be able to complete the ellipsis content and co-reference information and then produce a suitable summary accordingly. However, the current state-of-the-art models pay more attention on the topic or structure of summary, rather than the consistency of dialogue summary with its input dialogue context, which may suffer from the personal and logical inconsistency problem. In this paper, we propose a new model, named ReWriteSum, to tackle this problem. Firstly, an utterance rewriter is conducted to complete the ellipsis content of dialogue content and then obtain the rewriting utterances. Then, the co-reference data augmentation mechanism is utilized to replace the referential person name with its specific name to enhance the personal information. Finally, the rewriting utterances and the co-reference replacement data are used in the standard BART model. Experimental results on both SAMSum and DialSum datasets show that our ReWriteSum significantly outperforms baseline models, in terms of both metric-based and human evaluations. Further analysis on multi-speakers also shows that ReWriteSum can obtain relatively higher improvement with more speakers, validating the correctness and property of ReWriteSum.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-main.283
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3859–3869
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.283
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.283
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yue Fang, Hainan Zhang, Hongshen Chen, Zhuoye Ding, Bo Long, Yanyan Lan, and Yanquan Zhou. 2022. From spoken dialogue to formal summary: An utterance rewriting for dialogue summarization. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 3859–3869, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From spoken dialogue to formal summary: An utterance rewriting for dialogue summarization (Fang et al., NAACL 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.283.pdf
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 2022.naacl-main.283.software.zip
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