Deep Reinforcement Learning with Distributional Semantic Rewards for Abstractive Summarization

Siyao Li, Deren Lei, Pengda Qin, William Yang Wang


Abstract
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been a commonly-used strategy for the abstractive summarization task to address both the exposure bias and non-differentiable task issues. However, the conventional reward Rouge-L simply looks for exact n-grams matches between candidates and annotated references, which inevitably makes the generated sentences repetitive and incoherent. In this paper, instead of Rouge-L, we explore the practicability of utilizing the distributional semantics to measure the matching degrees. With distributional semantics, sentence-level evaluation can be obtained, and semantically-correct phrases can also be generated without being limited to the surface form of the reference sentences. Human judgments on Gigaword and CNN/Daily Mail datasets show that our proposed distributional semantics reward (DSR) has distinct superiority in capturing the lexical and compositional diversity of natural language.
Anthology ID:
D19-1623
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:
6038–6044
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1623
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1623
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Siyao Li, Deren Lei, Pengda Qin, and William Yang Wang. 2019. Deep Reinforcement Learning with Distributional Semantic Rewards for Abstractive Summarization. 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 6038–6044, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Deep Reinforcement Learning with Distributional Semantic Rewards for Abstractive Summarization (Li et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1623.pdf
Data
CNN/Daily Mail