The Query-Focused Text Summarization (QFTS) task aims at building systems that generate the summary of the text document(s) based on the given query. A key challenge in addressing this task is the lack of large labeled data for training the summarization model. In this article, we address this challenge by exploring a series of domain adaptation techniques. Given the recent success of pre-trained transformer models in a wide range of natural language processing tasks, we utilize such models to generate abstractive summaries for the QFTS task for both single-document and multi-document scenarios. For domain adaptation, we apply a variety of techniques using pre-trained transformer-based summarization models including transfer learning, weakly supervised learning, and distant supervision. Extensive experiments on six datasets show that our proposed approach is very effective in generating abstractive summaries for the QFTS task while setting a new state-of-the-art result in several datasets across a set of automatic and human evaluation metrics.

We present a simple yet effective method to train a named entity recognition (NER) model that operates on business telephone conversation transcripts that contain noise due to the nature of spoken conversation and artifacts of automatic speech recognition. We first fine-tune LUKE, a state-of-the-art Named Entity Recognition (NER) model, on a limited amount of transcripts, then use it as the teacher model to teach a smaller DistilBERT-based student model using a large amount of weakly labeled data and a small amount of human-annotated data. The model achieves high accuracy while also satisfying the practical constraints for inclusion in a commercial telephony product: realtime performance when deployed on cost-effective CPUs rather than GPUs. In this paper, we introduce the fine-tune-then-distill method for entity recognition on real world noisy data to deploy our NER model in a limited budget production environment. By generating pseudo-labels using a large teacher model pre-trained on typed text while fine-tuned on noisy speech text to train a smaller student model, we make the student model 75x times faster while reserving 99.09% of its accuracy. These findings demonstrate that our proposed approach is very effective in limited budget scenarios to alleviate the need of human labeling of a large amount of noisy data.

An Entity Linking system aligns the textual mentions of entities in a text to their corresponding entries in a knowledge base. However, deploying a neural entity linking system for efficient real-time inference in production environments is a challenging task. In this work, we present a neural entity linking system that connects the product and organization type entities in business conversations to their corresponding Wikipedia and Wikidata entries. The proposed system leverages Elasticsearch to ensure inference efficiency when deployed in a resource limited cloud machine, and obtains significant improvements in terms of inference speed and memory consumption while retaining high accuracy.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems generally do not produce punctuated transcripts. To make transcripts more readable and follow the expected input format for downstream language models, it is necessary to add punctuation marks. In this paper, we tackle the punctuation restoration problem specifically for the noisy text (e.g., phone conversation scenarios). To leverage the available written text datasets, we introduce a data sampling technique based on an n-gram language model to sample more training data that are similar to our in-domain data. Moreover, we propose a two-stage fine-tuning approach that utilizes the sampled external data as well as our in-domain dataset for models based on BERT. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms the baseline with an improvement of 1.12% F1 score.

Word embeddings that consider context have attracted great attention for various natural language processing tasks in recent years. In this paper, we utilize contextualized word embeddings with the transformer encoder for sentence similarity modeling in the answer selection task. We present two different approaches (feature-based and fine-tuning-based) for answer selection. In the feature-based approach, we utilize two types of contextualized embeddings, namely the Embeddings from Language Models (ELMo) and the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and integrate each of them with the transformer encoder. We find that integrating these contextual embeddings with the transformer encoder is effective to improve the performance of sentence similarity modeling. In the second approach, we fine-tune two pre-trained transformer encoder models for the answer selection task. Based on our experiments on six datasets, we find that the fine-tuning approach outperforms the feature-based approach on all of them. Among our fine-tuning-based models, the Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach (RoBERTa) model results in new state-of-the-art performance across five datasets.

In the Query Focused Multi-Document Summarization (QF-MDS) task, a set of documents and a query are given where the goal is to generate a summary from these documents based on the given query. However, one major challenge for this task is the lack of availability of labeled training datasets. To overcome this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel weakly supervised learning approach via utilizing distant supervision. In particular, we use datasets similar to the target dataset as the training data where we leverage pre-trained sentence similarity models to generate the weak reference summary of each individual document in a document set from the multi-document gold reference summaries. Then, we iteratively train our summarization model on each single-document to alleviate the computational complexity issue that occurs while training neural summarization models in multiple documents (i.e., long sequences) at once. Experimental results on the Document Understanding Conferences (DUC) datasets show that our proposed approach sets a new state-of-the-art result in terms of various evaluation metrics.