Reinforcement Learning for Abstractive Question Summarization with Question-aware Semantic Rewards

Shweta Yadav, Deepak Gupta, Asma Ben Abacha, Dina Demner-Fushman


Abstract
The growth of online consumer health questions has led to the necessity for reliable and accurate question answering systems. A recent study showed that manual summarization of consumer health questions brings significant improvement in retrieving relevant answers. However, the automatic summarization of long questions is a challenging task due to the lack of training data and the complexity of the related subtasks, such as the question focus and type recognition. In this paper, we introduce a reinforcement learning-based framework for abstractive question summarization. We propose two novel rewards obtained from the downstream tasks of (i) question-type identification and (ii) question-focus recognition to regularize the question generation model. These rewards ensure the generation of semantically valid questions and encourage the inclusion of key medical entities/foci in the question summary. We evaluated our proposed method on two benchmark datasets and achieved higher performance over state-of-the-art models. The manual evaluation of the summaries reveals that the generated questions are more diverse and have fewer factual inconsistencies than the baseline summaries. The source code is available here: https://github.com/shwetanlp/CHQ-Summ.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-short.33
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
249–255
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.33
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-short.33
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shweta Yadav, Deepak Gupta, Asma Ben Abacha, and Dina Demner-Fushman. 2021. Reinforcement Learning for Abstractive Question Summarization with Question-aware Semantic Rewards. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 249–255, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Reinforcement Learning for Abstractive Question Summarization with Question-aware Semantic Rewards (Yadav et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.acl-short.33.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.acl-short.33.mp4
Code
 shwetanlp/CHQ-Summ
Data
MATINF