MODABS: Multi-Objective Learning for Dynamic Aspect-Based Summarization

Xiaobo Guo, Soroush Vosoughi


Abstract
The rapid proliferation of online content necessitates effective summarization methods, among which dynamic aspect-based summarization stands out. Unlike its traditional counterpart, which assumes a fixed set of known aspects, this approach adapts to the varied aspects of the input text. We introduce a novel multi-objective learning framework employing a Longformer-Encoder-Decoder for this task. The framework optimizes aspect number prediction, minimizes disparity between generated and reference summaries for each aspect, and maximizes dissimilarity across aspect-specific summaries. Extensive experiments show our method significantly outperforms baselines on three diverse datasets, largely due to the effective alignment of generated and reference aspect counts without sacrificing single-aspect summarization quality.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.165
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2814–2827
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.165
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.165
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaobo Guo and Soroush Vosoughi. 2024. MODABS: Multi-Objective Learning for Dynamic Aspect-Based Summarization. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 2814–2827, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MODABS: Multi-Objective Learning for Dynamic Aspect-Based Summarization (Guo & Vosoughi, Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.165.pdf