Scoring Sentence Singletons and Pairs for Abstractive Summarization

Logan Lebanoff, Kaiqiang Song, Franck Dernoncourt, Doo Soon Kim, Seokhwan Kim, Walter Chang, Fei Liu


Abstract
When writing a summary, humans tend to choose content from one or two sentences and merge them into a single summary sentence. However, the mechanisms behind the selection of one or multiple source sentences remain poorly understood. Sentence fusion assumes multi-sentence input; yet sentence selection methods only work with single sentences and not combinations of them. There is thus a crucial gap between sentence selection and fusion to support summarizing by both compressing single sentences and fusing pairs. This paper attempts to bridge the gap by ranking sentence singletons and pairs together in a unified space. Our proposed framework attempts to model human methodology by selecting either a single sentence or a pair of sentences, then compressing or fusing the sentence(s) to produce a summary sentence. We conduct extensive experiments on both single- and multi-document summarization datasets and report findings on sentence selection and abstraction.
Anthology ID:
P19-1209
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2175–2189
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1209
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1209
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Logan Lebanoff, Kaiqiang Song, Franck Dernoncourt, Doo Soon Kim, Seokhwan Kim, Walter Chang, and Fei Liu. 2019. Scoring Sentence Singletons and Pairs for Abstractive Summarization. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2175–2189, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Scoring Sentence Singletons and Pairs for Abstractive Summarization (Lebanoff et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1209.pdf
Code
 ucfnlp/summarization-sing-pair-mix +  additional community code
Data
CNN/Daily Mail