Cameron Jen
2024
A Decoding Algorithm for Length-Control Summarization Based on Directed Acyclic Transformers
Chenyang Huang
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Hao Zhou
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Cameron Jen
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Kangjie Zheng
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Osmar Zaiane
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Lili Mou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Length-control summarization aims to condense long texts into a short one within a certain length limit. Previous approaches often use autoregressive (AR) models and treat the length requirement as a soft constraint, which may not always be satisfied. In this study, we propose a novel length-control decoding algorithm based on the directed acyclic Transformer (DAT). Our approach allows for multiple plausible sequence fragments and predicts a path to connect them. In addition, we propose a Sequence Maximum a Posteriori (Seq-MAP) decoding algorithm that marginalizes different possible paths and finds the most probable summary satisfying the length budget. Our algorithm is based on beam search, which further facilitates a reranker for performance improvement. Experimental results on the Gigaword dataset demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance for length-control summarization.
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