@inproceedings{xu-etal-2020-discourse,
    title = "Discourse-Aware Neural Extractive Text Summarization",
    author = "Xu, Jiacheng  and
      Gan, Zhe  and
      Cheng, Yu  and
      Liu, Jingjing",
    editor = "Jurafsky, Dan  and
      Chai, Joyce  and
      Schluter, Natalie  and
      Tetreault, Joel",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = jul,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2020.acl-main.451/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.451",
    pages = "5021--5031",
    abstract = "Recently BERT has been adopted for document encoding in state-of-the-art text summarization models. However, sentence-based extractive models often result in redundant or uninformative phrases in the extracted summaries. Also, long-range dependencies throughout a document are not well captured by BERT, which is pre-trained on sentence pairs instead of documents. To address these issues, we present a discourse-aware neural summarization model - DiscoBert. DiscoBert extracts sub-sentential discourse units (instead of sentences) as candidates for extractive selection on a finer granularity. To capture the long-range dependencies among discourse units, structural discourse graphs are constructed based on RST trees and coreference mentions, encoded with Graph Convolutional Networks. Experiments show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on popular summarization benchmarks compared to other BERT-base models."
}