Abstractive summarization has made tremendous progress in recent years. In this work, we perform fine-grained human annotations to evaluate long document abstractive summarization systems (i.e., models and metrics) with the aim of implementing them to generate reliable summaries. For long document abstractive models, we show that the constant strive for state-of-the-art ROUGE results can lead us to generate more relevant summaries but not factual ones. For long document evaluation metrics, human evaluation results show that ROUGE remains the best at evaluating the relevancy of a summary. It also reveals important limitations of factuality metrics in detecting different types of factual errors and the reasons behind the effectiveness of BARTScore. We then suggest promising directions in the endeavor of developing factual consistency metrics. Finally, we release our annotated long document dataset with the hope that it can contribute to the development of metrics across a broader range of summarization settings.

This paper presents an unsupervised extractive approach to summarize scientific long documents based on the Information Bottleneck principle. Inspired by previous work which uses the Information Bottleneck principle for sentence compression, we extend it to document level summarization with two separate steps. In the first step, we use signal(s) as queries to retrieve the key content from the source document. Then, a pre-trained language model conducts further sentence search and edit to return the final extracted summaries. Importantly, our work can be flexibly extended to a multi-view framework by different signals. Automatic evaluation on three scientific document datasets verifies the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The further human evaluation suggests that the extracted summaries cover more content aspects than previous systems.

The Scholarly Document Processing (SDP) workshop is to encourage more efforts on natural language understanding of scientific task. It contains three shared tasks and we participate in the LongSumm shared task. In this paper, we describe our text summarization system, SciSummPip, inspired by SummPip (Zhao et al., 2020) that is an unsupervised text summarization system for multi-document in News domain. Our SciSummPip includes a transformer-based language model SciBERT (Beltagy et al., 2019) for contextual sentence representation, content selection with PageRank (Page et al., 1999), sentence graph construction with both deep and linguistic information, sentence graph clustering and within-graph summary generation. Our work differs from previous method in that content selection and a summary length constraint is applied to adapt to the scientific domain. The experiment results on both training dataset and blind test dataset show the effectiveness of our method, and we empirically verify the robustness of modules used in SciSummPip with BERTScore (Zhang et al., 2019a).