Open Domain Multi-document Summarization: A Comprehensive Study of Model Brittleness under Retrieval
John Giorgi, Luca Soldaini, Bo Wang, Gary Bader, Kyle Lo, Lucy Wang, Arman Cohan
Abstract
Multi-document summarization (MDS) assumes a set of topic-related documents are provided as input. In practice, this document set is not always available; it would need to be retrieved given an information need, i.e. a question or topic statement, a setting we dub “open-domain’ MDS. We study this more challenging setting by formalizing the task and bootstrapping it using existing datasets, retrievers and summarizers. Via extensive automatic and human evaluation, we determine: (1) state-of-the-art summarizers suffer large reductions in performance when applied to open-domain MDS, (2) additional training in the open-domain setting can reduce this sensitivity to imperfect retrieval, and (3) summarizers are insensitive to the retrieval of duplicate documents and the order of retrieved documents, but highly sensitive to other errors, like the retrieval of irrelevant documents. Based on our results, we provide practical guidelines to enable future work on open-domain MDS, e.g. how to choose the number of retrieved documents to summarize. Our results suggest that new retrieval and summarization methods and annotated resources for training and evaluation are necessary for further progress in the open-domain setting.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.findings-emnlp.549
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 8177–8199
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2023.findings-emnlp.549/
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.549
- Cite (ACL):
- John Giorgi, Luca Soldaini, Bo Wang, Gary Bader, Kyle Lo, Lucy Wang, and Arman Cohan. 2023. Open Domain Multi-document Summarization: A Comprehensive Study of Model Brittleness under Retrieval. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 8177–8199, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Open Domain Multi-document Summarization: A Comprehensive Study of Model Brittleness under Retrieval (Giorgi et al., Findings 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2023.findings-emnlp.549.pdf