How to Write Summaries with Patterns? Learning towards Abstractive Summarization through Prototype Editing

Shen Gao, Xiuying Chen, Piji Li, Zhangming Chan, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan


Abstract
Under special circumstances, summaries should conform to a particular style with patterns, such as court judgments and abstracts in academic papers. To this end, the prototype document-summary pairs can be utilized to generate better summaries. There are two main challenges in this task: (1) the model needs to incorporate learned patterns from the prototype, but (2) should avoid copying contents other than the patternized words—such as irrelevant facts—into the generated summaries. To tackle these challenges, we design a model named Prototype Editing based Summary Generator (PESG). PESG first learns summary patterns and prototype facts by analyzing the correlation between a prototype document and its summary. Prototype facts are then utilized to help extract facts from the input document. Next, an editing generator generates new summary based on the summary pattern or extracted facts. Finally, to address the second challenge, a fact checker is used to estimate mutual information between the input document and generated summary, providing an additional signal for the generator. Extensive experiments conducted on a large-scale real-world text summarization dataset show that PESG achieves the state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluations.
Anthology ID:
D19-1388
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3741–3751
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1388
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1388
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shen Gao, Xiuying Chen, Piji Li, Zhangming Chan, Dongyan Zhao, and Rui Yan. 2019. How to Write Summaries with Patterns? Learning towards Abstractive Summarization through Prototype Editing. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 3741–3751, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How to Write Summaries with Patterns? Learning towards Abstractive Summarization through Prototype Editing (Gao et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1388.pdf
Code
 gsh199449/proto-summ
Data
Proto Summ