AttSum: Joint Learning of Focusing and Summarization with Neural Attention

Ziqiang Cao, Wenjie Li, Sujian Li, Furu Wei, Yanran Li


Abstract
Query relevance ranking and sentence saliency ranking are the two main tasks in extractive query-focused summarization. Previous supervised summarization systems often perform the two tasks in isolation. However, since reference summaries are the trade-off between relevance and saliency, using them as supervision, neither of the two rankers could be trained well. This paper proposes a novel summarization system called AttSum, which tackles the two tasks jointly. It automatically learns distributed representations for sentences as well as the document cluster. Meanwhile, it applies the attention mechanism to simulate the attentive reading of human behavior when a query is given. Extensive experiments are conducted on DUC query-focused summarization benchmark datasets. Without using any hand-crafted features, AttSum achieves competitive performance. We also observe that the sentences recognized to focus on the query indeed meet the query need.
Anthology ID:
C16-1053
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
547–556
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1053
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ziqiang Cao, Wenjie Li, Sujian Li, Furu Wei, and Yanran Li. 2016. AttSum: Joint Learning of Focusing and Summarization with Neural Attention. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 547–556, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
AttSum: Joint Learning of Focusing and Summarization with Neural Attention (Cao et al., COLING 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1053.pdf