SummIt: Iterative Text Summarization via ChatGPT

Haopeng Zhang, Xiao Liu, Jiawei Zhang


Abstract
Existing text summarization systems have made significant progress in recent years, but typically generate summaries in a single step. The one-shot summarization setting is sometimes inadequate, however, as the generated summary may contain hallucinations or overlook important details related to the reader’s interests. In this paper, we address this limitation by proposing SummIt, an iterative text summarization framework based on large language models like ChatGPT. Our framework enables the model to refine the generated summary iteratively through self-evaluation and feedback, closely resembling the iterative process humans undertake when drafting and revising summaries. Furthermore, we explore the potential benefits of integrating knowledge and topic extractors into the framework to enhance summary faithfulness and controllability. We evaluate the performance of our framework on three benchmark summarization datasets through empirical and qualitative analyses. We also conduct a human evaluation to validate the effectiveness of the model’s refinements and find a potential issue of over-correction.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.714
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:
10644–10657
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.714
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.714
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haopeng Zhang, Xiao Liu, and Jiawei Zhang. 2023. SummIt: Iterative Text Summarization via ChatGPT. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 10644–10657, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SummIt: Iterative Text Summarization via ChatGPT (Zhang et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.714.pdf
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