Controllable Text Summarization: Unraveling Challenges, Approaches, and Prospects - A Survey

Ashok Urlana, Pruthwik Mishra, Tathagato Roy, Rahul Mishra


Abstract
Generic text summarization approaches often fail to address the specific intent and needs of individual users. Recently, scholarly attention has turned to the development of summarization methods that are more closely tailored and controlled to align with specific objectives and user needs. Despite a growing corpus of controllable summarization research, there is no comprehensive survey available that thoroughly explores the diverse controllable attributes employed in this context, delves into the associated challenges, and investigates the existing solutions. In this survey, we formalize the Controllable Text Summarization (CTS) task, categorize controllable attributes according to their shared characteristics and objectives, and present a thorough examination of existing datasets and methods within each category. Moreover, based on our findings, we uncover limitations and research gaps, while also exploring potential solutions and future directions for CTS. We release our detailed analysis of CTS papers at https://github.com/ashokurlana/controllable_text_summarization_survey.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.93
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1603–1623
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.93
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.93
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ashok Urlana, Pruthwik Mishra, Tathagato Roy, and Rahul Mishra. 2024. Controllable Text Summarization: Unraveling Challenges, Approaches, and Prospects - A Survey. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 1603–1623, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Controllable Text Summarization: Unraveling Challenges, Approaches, and Prospects - A Survey (Urlana et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.93.pdf