Abstractive Timeline Summarization

Julius Steen, Katja Markert


Abstract
Timeline summarization (TLS) automatically identifies key dates of major events and provides short descriptions of what happened on these dates. Previous approaches to TLS have focused on extractive methods. In contrast, we suggest an abstractive timeline summarization system. Our system is entirely unsupervised, which makes it especially suited to TLS where there are very few gold summaries available for training of supervised systems. In addition, we present the first abstractive oracle experiments for TLS. Our system outperforms extractive competitors in terms of ROUGE when the number of input documents is high and the output requires strong compression. In these cases, our oracle experiments confirm that our approach also has a higher upper bound for ROUGE scores than extractive methods. A study with human judges shows that our abstractive system also produces output that is easy to read and understand.
Anthology ID:
D19-5403
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Lu Wang, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Giuseppe Carenini, Fei Liu
Venue:
WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
21–31
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-5403
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-5403
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Julius Steen and Katja Markert. 2019. Abstractive Timeline Summarization. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization, pages 21–31, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Abstractive Timeline Summarization (Steen & Markert, 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-5403.pdf