Controllable summarization allows users to generate customized summaries with specified attributes. However, due to the lack of designated annotations of controlled summaries, existing work has to craft pseudo datasets by adapting generic summarization benchmarks. Furthermore, most research focuses on controlling single attributes individually (e.g., a short summary or a highly abstractive summary) rather than controlling a mix of attributes together (e.g., a short and highly abstractive summary). In this paper, we propose MACSum, the first human-annotated summarization dataset for controlling mixed attributes. It contains source texts from two domains, news articles and dialogues, with human-annotated summaries controlled by five designed attributes (Length, Extractiveness, Specificity, Topic, and Speaker). We propose two simple and effective parameter-efficient approaches for the new task of mixed controllable summarization based on hard prompt tuning and soft prefix tuning. Results and analysis demonstrate that hard prompt models yield the best performance on most metrics and human evaluations. However, mixed-attribute control is still challenging for summarization tasks. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/MACSum.

Summaries of medical text shall be faithful by being consistent and factual with source inputs, which is an important but understudied topic for safety and efficiency in healthcare. In this paper, we investigate and improve faithfulness in summarization on a broad range of medical summarization tasks. Our investigation reveals that current summarization models often produce unfaithful outputs for medical input text. We then introduce FaMeSumm, a framework to improve faithfulness by fine-tuning pre-trained language models based on medical knowledge. FaMeSumm performs contrastive learning on designed sets of faithful and unfaithful summaries, and it incorporates medical terms and their contexts to encourage faithful generation of medical terms. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three datasets in two languages: health question and radiology report summarization datasets in English, and a patient-doctor dialogue dataset in Chinese. Results demonstrate that FaMeSumm is flexible and effective by delivering consistent improvements over mainstream language models such as BART, T5, mT5, and PEGASUS, yielding state-of-the-art performances on metrics for faithfulness and general quality. Human evaluation by doctors also shows that FaMeSumm generates more faithful outputs. Our code is available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/FaMeSumm.

Cross-Lingual Semantic Parsing (CLSP) aims to translate queries in multiple natural languages (NLs) into meaning representations (MRs) such as SQL, lambda calculus, and logic forms. However, existing CLSP models are separately proposed and evaluated on datasets of limited tasks and applications, impeding a comprehensive and unified evaluation of CLSP on a diverse range of NLs and MRs. To this end, we present XSemPLR, a unified benchmark for cross-lingual semantic parsing featured with 22 natural languages and 8 meaning representations by examining and selecting 9 existing datasets to cover 5 tasks and 164 domains. We use XSemPLR to conduct a comprehensive benchmark study on a wide range of multilingual language models including encoder-based models (mBERT, XLM-R), encoder-decoder models (mBART, mT5), and decoder-based models (Codex, BLOOM). We design 6 experiment settings covering various lingual combinations (monolingual, multilingual, cross-lingual) and numbers of learning samples (full dataset, few-shot, and zero-shot). Our experiments show that encoder-decoder models (mT5) achieve the highest performance compared with other popular models, and multilingual training can further improve the average performance. Notably, multilingual large language models (e.g., BLOOM) are still inadequate to perform CLSP tasks. We also find that the performance gap between monolingual training and cross-lingual transfer learning is still significant for multilingual models, though it can be mitigated by cross-lingual few-shot training. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/XSemPLR.

Text summarization helps readers capture salient information from documents, news, interviews, and meetings. However, most state-of-the-art pretrained language models (LM) are unable to efficiently process long text for many summarization tasks. In this paper, we propose Summ^N, a simple, flexible, and effective multi-stage framework for input texts that are longer than the maximum context length of typical pretrained LMs. Summ^N first splits the data samples and generates a coarse summary in multiple stages and then produces the final fine-grained summary based on it. Our framework can process input text of arbitrary length by adjusting the number of stages while keeping the LM input size fixed. Moreover, it can deal with both single-source documents and dialogues, and it can be used on top of different backbone abstractive summarization models. To the best of our knowledge, Summ^N is the first multi-stage split-then-summarize framework for long input summarization. Our experiments demonstrate that Summ^N outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by improving ROUGE scores on three long meeting summarization datasets AMI, ICSI, and QMSum, two long TV series datasets from SummScreen, and a long document summarization dataset GovReport. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/Summ-N.

Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on short-input summarization. However, they still struggle with summarizing longer text. In this paper, we present DYLE, a novel dynamic latent extraction approach for abstractive long-input summarization. DYLE jointly trains an extractor and a generator and treats the extracted text snippets as the latent variable, allowing dynamic snippet-level attention weights during decoding. To provide adequate supervision, we propose simple yet effective heuristics for oracle extraction as well as a consistency loss term, which encourages the extractor to approximate the averaged dynamic weights predicted by the generator. We evaluate our method on different long-document and long-dialogue summarization tasks: GovReport, QMSum, and arXiv. Experiment results show that DYLE outperforms all existing methods on GovReport and QMSum, with gains up to 6.1 ROUGE, while yielding strong results on arXiv. Further analysis shows that the proposed dynamic weights provide interpretability of our generation process.

To automatically correct handwritten assignments, the traditional approach is to use an OCR model to recognize characters and compare them to answers. The OCR model easily gets confused on recognizing handwritten Chinese characters, and the textual information of the answers is missing during the model inference. However, teachers always have these answers in mind to review and correct assignments. In this paper, we focus on the Chinese cloze tests correction and propose a multimodal approach(named AiM). The encoded representations of answers interact with the visual information of students’ handwriting. Instead of predicting ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, we perform the sequence labeling on the answer text to infer which answer character differs from the handwritten content in a fine-grained way. We take samples of OCR datasets as the positive samples for this task, and develop a negative sample augmentation method to scale up the training data. Experimental results show that AiM outperforms OCR-based methods by a large margin. Extensive studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our multimodal approach.

Dialogue summarization helps readers capture salient information from long conversations in meetings, interviews, and TV series. However, real-world dialogues pose a great challenge to current summarization models, as the dialogue length typically exceeds the input limits imposed by recent transformer-based pre-trained models, and the interactive nature of dialogues makes relevant information more context-dependent and sparsely distributed than news articles. In this work, we perform a comprehensive study on long dialogue summarization by investigating three strategies to deal with the lengthy input problem and locate relevant information: (1) extended transformer models such as Longformer, (2) retrieve-then-summarize pipeline models with several dialogue utterance retrieval methods, and (3) hierarchical dialogue encoding models such as HMNet. Our experimental results on three long dialogue datasets (QMSum, MediaSum, SummScreen) show that the retrieve-then-summarize pipeline models yield the best performance. We also demonstrate that the summary quality can be further improved with a stronger retrieval model and pretraining on proper external summarization datasets.

Recent advances in summarization provide models that can generate summaries of higher quality. Such models now exist for a number of summarization tasks, including query-based summarization, dialogue summarization, and multi-document summarization. While such models and tasks are rapidly growing in the research field, it has also become challenging for non-experts to keep track of them. To make summarization methods more accessible to a wider audience, we develop SummerTime by rethinking the summarization task from the perspective of an NLP non-expert. SummerTime is a complete toolkit for text summarization, including various models, datasets, and evaluation metrics, for a full spectrum of summarization-related tasks. SummerTime integrates with libraries designed for NLP researchers, and enables users with easy-to-use APIs. With SummerTime, users can locate pipeline solutions and search for the best model with their own data, and visualize the differences, all with a few lines of code. We also provide explanations for models and evaluation metrics to help users understand the model behaviors and select models that best suit their needs. Our library, along with a notebook demo, is available at https://github.com/Yale-LILY/SummerTime.