Summarizing Multiple Documents with Conversational Structure for Meta-Review Generation

Miao Li, Eduard Hovy, Jey Lau


Abstract
We present PeerSum, a novel dataset for generating meta-reviews of scientific papers. The meta-reviews can be interpreted as abstractive summaries of reviews, multi-turn discussions and the paper abstract. These source documents have a rich inter-document relationship with an explicit hierarchical conversational structure, cross-references and (occasionally) conflicting information. To introduce the structural inductive bias into pre-trained language models, we introduce RAMMER (Relationship-aware Multi-task Meta-review Generator), a model that uses sparse attention based on the conversational structure and a multi-task training objective that predicts metadata features (e.g., review ratings). Our experimental results show that RAMMER outperforms other strong baseline models in terms of a suite of automatic evaluation metrics. Further analyses, however, reveal that RAMMER and other models struggle to handle conflicts in source documents, suggesting meta-review generation is a challenging task and a promising avenue for further research.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.472
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7089–7112
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.472
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.472
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Miao Li, Eduard Hovy, and Jey Lau. 2023. Summarizing Multiple Documents with Conversational Structure for Meta-Review Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 7089–7112, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Summarizing Multiple Documents with Conversational Structure for Meta-Review Generation (Li et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.472.pdf