OpineSum: Entailment-based self-training for abstractive opinion summarization

Annie Louis, Joshua Maynez


Abstract
A typical product or place often has hundreds of reviews, and summarization of these texts is an important and challenging problem. Recent progress on abstractive summarization in domains such as news has been driven by supervised systems trained on hundreds of thousands of news articles paired with human-written summaries. However for opinion texts, such large scale datasets are rarely available. Unsupervised methods, self-training, and few-shot learning approaches bridge that gap. In this work, we present a novel self-training approach, OpineSum for abstractive opinion summarization. The self-training summaries in this approach are built automatically using a novel application of textual entailment and capture the consensus of opinions across the various reviews for an item. This method can be used to obtain silver-standard summaries on a large scale and train both unsupervised and few-shot abstractive summarization systems. OpineSum outperforms strong peer systems in both settings.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.686
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:
10774–10790
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.686
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.686
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Annie Louis and Joshua Maynez. 2023. OpineSum: Entailment-based self-training for abstractive opinion summarization. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 10774–10790, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
OpineSum: Entailment-based self-training for abstractive opinion summarization (Louis & Maynez, Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.686.pdf