What Are You Token About? Differentiable Perturbed Top-k Token Selection for Scientific Document Summarization

Luca Ragazzi, Paolo Italiani, Gianluca Moro, Mattia Panni


Abstract
Scientific document summarization aims to condense complex and long articles in both technical and plain-language terms to facilitate the accessibility and dissemination of scientific findings. Existing datasets suffer from a deficiency in source heterogeneity, as their data predominantly stem from a single common resource, hindering effective model training and generalizability. First, we introduce SciLay, a novel dataset that includes documents from multiple natural science journals with expert-authored technical and lay summaries. Second, we propose PrunePert, a new transformer-based model that incorporates a differentiable perturbed top-k encoder layer to prune irrelevant tokens in end-to-end learning. Experimental results show that our model achieves a nearly 2x speed-up compared to a state-of-the-art linear transformer, remaining comparable in effectiveness. Additional examinations underscore the importance of employing a training dataset that includes different sources to enhance the generalizability of the models. Code is available at https://github.com/disi-unibo-nlp/sci-lay.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.561
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:
9427–9440
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.561
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Luca Ragazzi, Paolo Italiani, Gianluca Moro, and Mattia Panni. 2024. What Are You Token About? Differentiable Perturbed Top-k Token Selection for Scientific Document Summarization. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 9427–9440, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What Are You Token About? Differentiable Perturbed Top-k Token Selection for Scientific Document Summarization (Ragazzi et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.561.pdf