𝜇PLAN: Summarizing using a Content Plan as Cross-Lingual Bridge

Fantine Huot, Joshua Maynez, Chris Alberti, Reinald Kim Amplayo, Priyanka Agrawal, Constanza Fierro, Shashi Narayan, Mirella Lapata


Abstract
Cross-lingual summarization aims to generate a summary in one languagegiven input in a different language, allowing for the dissemination ofrelevant content among different language speaking populations. Thetask is challenging mainly due to the paucity of cross-lingualdatasets and the compounded difficulty of summarizing andtranslating.This work presents 𝜇PLAN, an approach to cross-lingual summarization that uses an intermediate planning step as a cross-lingual bridge. We formulate the plan as a sequence of entities capturing thesummary’s content and the order in which it should becommunicated. Importantly, our plans abstract from surface form: usinga multilingual knowledge base, we align entities to their canonicaldesignation across languages and generate the summary conditioned onthis cross-lingual bridge and the input. Automatic and human evaluation on the XWikis dataset (across four language pairs) demonstrates that our planning objective achieves state-of-the-art performance interms of informativeness and faithfulness. Moreover, 𝜇PLAN modelsimprove the zero-shot transfer to new cross-lingual language pairscompared to baselines without a planning component.
Anthology ID:
2024.eacl-long.131
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2146–2163
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.131
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fantine Huot, Joshua Maynez, Chris Alberti, Reinald Kim Amplayo, Priyanka Agrawal, Constanza Fierro, Shashi Narayan, and Mirella Lapata. 2024. 𝜇PLAN: Summarizing using a Content Plan as Cross-Lingual Bridge. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2146–2163, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
𝜇PLAN: Summarizing using a Content Plan as Cross-Lingual Bridge (Huot et al., EACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.131.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.131.mp4