How “Multi” is Multi-Document Summarization?

Ruben Wolhandler, Arie Cattan, Ori Ernst, Ido Dagan

Abstract
The task of multi-document summarization (MDS) aims at models that, given multiple documents as input, are able to generate a summary that combines disperse information, originally spread __across__ these documents. Accordingly, it is expected that both reference summaries in MDS datasets, as well as system summaries, would indeed be based on such dispersed information. In this paper, we argue for quantifying and assessing this expectation. To that end, we propose an automated measure for evaluating the degree to which a summary is “disperse”, in the sense of the number of source documents needed to cover its content. We apply our measure to empirically analyze several popular MDS datasets, with respect to their reference summaries, as well as the output of state-of-the-art systems. Our results show that certain MDS datasets barely require combining information from multiple documents, where a single document often covers the full summary content. Overall, we advocate using our metric for assessing and improving the degree to which summarization datasets require combining multi-document information, and similarly how summarization models actually meet this challenge.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.389
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5761–5769
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.389
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.389
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruben Wolhandler, Arie Cattan, Ori Ernst, and Ido Dagan. 2022. How “Multi” is Multi-Document Summarization?. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5761–5769, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How “Multi” is Multi-Document Summarization? (Wolhandler et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2022.emnlp-main.389.pdf
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