Extractive summarization aims to select a set of salient sentences from the source document to form a summary. Context information has been considered one of the key factors for this task. Meanwhile, there also exist other pattern factors that can identify sentence importance, such as sentence position or certain n-gram tokens. However, such pattern information is only effective in specific datasets or domains and can not be generalized like the context information when there only exists limited data. In this case, current extractive summarization models may suffer from a performance drop when transferring to a new dataset. In this paper, we attempt to apply disentangled representation learning on extractive summarization, and separate the two key factors for the task, context and pattern, for a better generalization ability in the low-resource setting. To achieve this, we propose two groups of losses for encoding and disentangling sentence representations into context representations and pattern representations. In this case, we can either use only the context information in the zero-shot setting or fine-tune the pattern information in the few-shot setting. Experimental results on three summarization datasets from different domains show the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have attained the impressive capability to resolve a wide range of NLP tasks by fine-tuning high-quality instruction data. However, collecting human-written data of high quality, especially multi-turn dialogues, is expensive and unattainable for most people. Though previous studies have used powerful LLMs to generate the dialogues automatically, they all suffer from generating untruthful dialogues because of the model hallucination. Therefore, we propose a method called RefGPT to generate enormous truthful and customized dialogues without worrying about factual errors caused by the model hallucination. RefGPT solves the model hallucination in dialogue generation by restricting the LLMs to leverage the given reference instead of reciting their own knowledge to generate dialogues. Additionally, RefGPT adds detailed controls on every utterance to enable high customization capability, which previous studies have ignored. On the basis of RefGPT, we also propose two high-quality dialogue datasets generated by GPT-4, namely **RefGPT-Fact** and **RefGPT-Code**. RefGPT-Fact is a dataset with 100k multi-turn dialogues based on factual knowledge and RefGPT-Code has 76k multi-turn dialogues covering a wide range of coding scenarios. Our code and datasets are released in https://github.com/mutonix/RefGPT.

Abstractive Text Summarization (ATS) models are commonly trained using large-scale data that is randomly shuffled. However, the impact of data selection and data ordering on ATS models remains a relatively unexplored research area, where a significant challenge lies in accurately assessing the learning difficulty of each training instance. This study introduces a Data Selection Curriculum (DSC) scoring system that incorporates both the difficulty of improving ATS model via an instance and the expected performance on this instance. By selectively excluding excessively simple and overly complex instances, the training efficiency can be optimized. Furthermore, curriculum learning is integrated to accelerate convergence and improve performance by gradually increasing the learning difficulty, inspired by human learners. Experimental results on the CNN/DailyMail dataset demonstrate that our approach surpasses potent baselines, utilizing a mere 20% of the available instances.

Query-focused summarization has been considered as an important extension for text summarization. It aims to generate a concise highlight for a given query. Different from text summarization, query-focused summarization has long been plagued by the problem of lacking high-quality large-scale datasets. In this paper, we investigate the idea that whether we can integrate and transfer the knowledge of text summarization and question answering to assist the few-shot learning in query-focused summarization. Here, we propose prefix-merging, a prefix-based pretraining strategy for few-shot learning in query-focused summarization. Drawn inspiration from prefix-tuning, we are allowed to integrate the task knowledge from text summarization and question answering into a properly designed prefix and apply the merged prefix to query-focused summarization. With only a small amount of trainable parameters, prefix-merging outperforms fine-tuning on query-focused summarization. We further discuss the influence of different prefix designs and propose a visualized explanation for how prefix-merging works.

Sentence fusion is a conditional generation task that merges several related sentences into a coherent one, which can be deemed as a summary sentence. The importance of sentence fusion has long been recognized by communities in natural language generation, especially in text summarization. It remains challenging for a state-of-the-art neural abstractive summarization model to generate a well-integrated summary sentence. In this paper, we explore the effective sentence fusion method in the context of text summarization. We propose to build an event graph from the input sentences to effectively capture and organize related events in a structured way and use the constructed event graph to guide sentence fusion. In addition to make use of the attention over the content of sentences and graph nodes, we further develop a graph flow attention mechanism to control the fusion process via the graph structure. When evaluated on sentence fusion data built from two summarization datasets, CNN/DaliyMail and Multi-News, our model shows to achieve state-of-the-art performance in terms of Rouge and other metrics like fusion rate and faithfulness.

Most current extractive summarization models generate summaries by selecting salient sentences. However, one of the problems with sentence-level extractive summarization is that there exists a gap between the human-written gold summary and the oracle sentence labels. In this paper, we propose to extract fact-level semantic units for better extractive summarization. We also introduce a hierarchical structure, which incorporates the multi-level of granularities of the textual information into the model. In addition, we incorporate our model with BERT using a hierarchical graph mask. This allows us to combine BERT’s ability in natural language understanding and the structural information without increasing the scale of the model. Experiments on the CNN/DaliyMail dataset show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results.