Separating Context and Pattern: Learning Disentangled Sentence Representations for Low-Resource Extractive Summarization

Ruifeng Yuan, Shichao Sun, Zili Wang, Ziqiang Cao, Wenjie Li


Abstract
Extractive summarization aims to select a set of salient sentences from the source document to form a summary. Context information has been considered one of the key factors for this task. Meanwhile, there also exist other pattern factors that can identify sentence importance, such as sentence position or certain n-gram tokens. However, such pattern information is only effective in specific datasets or domains and can not be generalized like the context information when there only exists limited data. In this case, current extractive summarization models may suffer from a performance drop when transferring to a new dataset. In this paper, we attempt to apply disentangled representation learning on extractive summarization, and separate the two key factors for the task, context and pattern, for a better generalization ability in the low-resource setting. To achieve this, we propose two groups of losses for encoding and disentangling sentence representations into context representations and pattern representations. In this case, we can either use only the context information in the zero-shot setting or fine-tune the pattern information in the few-shot setting. Experimental results on three summarization datasets from different domains show the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.479
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7575–7586
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.479
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.479
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruifeng Yuan, Shichao Sun, Zili Wang, Ziqiang Cao, and Wenjie Li. 2023. Separating Context and Pattern: Learning Disentangled Sentence Representations for Low-Resource Extractive Summarization. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 7575–7586, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Separating Context and Pattern: Learning Disentangled Sentence Representations for Low-Resource Extractive Summarization (Yuan et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.479.pdf