Learning to Rank Salient Content for Query-focused Summarization

Sajad Sotudeh, Nazli Goharian


Abstract
This study examines the potential of integrating Learning-to-Rank (LTR) with Query-focused Summarization (QFS) to enhance the summary relevance via content prioritization. Using a shared secondary decoder with the summarization decoder, we carry out the LTR task at the segment level. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our model outperforms on QMSum benchmark (all metrics) and matches on SQuALITY benchmark (2 metrics) as measured by Rouge and BertScore while offering a lower training overhead. Specifically, on the QMSum benchmark, our proposed system achieves improvements, particularly in Rouge-L (+0.42) and BertScore (+0.34), indicating enhanced understanding and relevance. While facing minor challenges in Rouge-1 and Rouge-2 scores on the SQuALITY benchmark, the model significantly excels in Rouge-L (+1.47), underscoring its capability to generate coherent summaries. Human evaluations emphasize the efficacy of our method in terms of relevance and faithfulness of the generated summaries, without sacrificing fluency. A deeper analysis reveals our model’s superiority over the state-of-the-art for broad queries, as opposed to specific ones, from a qualitative standpoint. We further present an error analysis of our model, pinpointing challenges faced and suggesting potential directions for future research in this field.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.838
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15038–15048
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_missing_videos/2024.emnlp-main.838/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.838
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sajad Sotudeh and Nazli Goharian. 2024. Learning to Rank Salient Content for Query-focused Summarization. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 15038–15048, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Rank Salient Content for Query-focused Summarization (Sotudeh & Goharian, EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_missing_videos/2024.emnlp-main.838.pdf