Vision Guided Generative Pre-trained Language Models for Multimodal Abstractive Summarization

Tiezheng Yu, Wenliang Dai, Zihan Liu, Pascale Fung


Abstract
Multimodal abstractive summarization (MAS) models that summarize videos (vision modality) and their corresponding transcripts (text modality) are able to extract the essential information from massive multimodal data on the Internet. Recently, large-scale generative pre-trained language models (GPLMs) have been shown to be effective in text generation tasks. However, existing MAS models cannot leverage GPLMs’ powerful generation ability. To fill this research gap, we aim to study two research questions: 1) how to inject visual information into GPLMs without hurting their generation ability; and 2) where is the optimal place in GPLMs to inject the visual information? In this paper, we present a simple yet effective method to construct vision guided (VG) GPLMs for the MAS task using attention-based add-on layers to incorporate visual information while maintaining their original text generation ability. Results show that our best model significantly surpasses the prior state-of-the-art model by 5.7 ROUGE-1, 5.3 ROUGE-2, and 5.1 ROUGE-L scores on the How2 dataset, and our vision guidance method contributes 83.6% of the overall improvement. Furthermore, we conduct thorough ablation studies to analyze the effectiveness of various modality fusion methods and fusion locations.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.326
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3995–4007
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.326
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.326
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tiezheng Yu, Wenliang Dai, Zihan Liu, and Pascale Fung. 2021. Vision Guided Generative Pre-trained Language Models for Multimodal Abstractive Summarization. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3995–4007, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Vision Guided Generative Pre-trained Language Models for Multimodal Abstractive Summarization (Yu et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2021.emnlp-main.326.pdf
Software:
 2021.emnlp-main.326.Software.zip
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2021.emnlp-main.326.mp4
Code
 hltchkust/vg-gplms
Data
How2