Ansong Ni


2022

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SummN: A Multi-Stage Summarization Framework for Long Input Dialogues and Documents
Yusen Zhang | Ansong Ni | Ziming Mao | Chen Henry Wu | Chenguang Zhu | Budhaditya Deb | Ahmed Awadallah | Dragomir Radev | Rui Zhang
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Text summarization helps readers capture salient information from documents, news, interviews, and meetings. However, most state-of-the-art pretrained language models (LM) are unable to efficiently process long text for many summarization tasks. In this paper, we propose SummN, a simple, flexible, and effective multi-stage framework for input texts that are longer than the maximum context length of typical pretrained LMs. SummN first splits the data samples and generates a coarse summary in multiple stages and then produces the final fine-grained summary based on it. Our framework can process input text of arbitrary length by adjusting the number of stages while keeping the LM input size fixed. Moreover, it can deal with both single-source documents and dialogues, and it can be used on top of different backbone abstractive summarization models. To the best of our knowledge, SummN is the first multi-stage split-then-summarize framework for long input summarization. Our experiments demonstrate that SummN outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by improving ROUGE scores on three long meeting summarization datasets AMI, ICSI, and QMSum, two long TV series datasets from SummScreen, and a long document summarization dataset GovReport. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/Summ-N.

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DYLE: Dynamic Latent Extraction for Abstractive Long-Input Summarization
Ziming Mao | Chen Henry Wu | Ansong Ni | Yusen Zhang | Rui Zhang | Tao Yu | Budhaditya Deb | Chenguang Zhu | Ahmed Awadallah | Dragomir Radev
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on short-input summarization. However, they still struggle with summarizing longer text. In this paper, we present DYLE, a novel dynamic latent extraction approach for abstractive long-input summarization. DYLE jointly trains an extractor and a generator and treats the extracted text snippets as the latent variable, allowing dynamic snippet-level attention weights during decoding. To provide adequate supervision, we propose simple yet effective heuristics for oracle extraction as well as a consistency loss term, which encourages the extractor to approximate the averaged dynamic weights predicted by the generator. We evaluate our method on different long-document and long-dialogue summarization tasks: GovReport, QMSum, and arXiv. Experiment results show that DYLE outperforms all existing methods on GovReport and QMSum, with gains up to 6.1 ROUGE, while yielding strong results on arXiv. Further analysis shows that the proposed dynamic weights provide interpretability of our generation process.

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UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models
Tianbao Xie | Chen Henry Wu | Peng Shi | Ruiqi Zhong | Torsten Scholak | Michihiro Yasunaga | Chien-Sheng Wu | Ming Zhong | Pengcheng Yin | Sida I. Wang | Victor Zhong | Bailin Wang | Chengzu Li | Connor Boyle | Ansong Ni | Ziyu Yao | Dragomir Radev | Caiming Xiong | Lingpeng Kong | Rui Zhang | Noah A. Smith | Luke Zettlemoyer | Tao Yu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Structured knowledge grounding (SKG) leverages structured knowledge to complete user requests, such as semantic parsing over databases and question answering over knowledge bases. Since the inputs and outputs of SKG tasks are heterogeneous, they have been studied separately by different communities, which limits systematic and compatible research on SKG. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by proposing the UnifiedSKG framework, which unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format, aiming to promote systematic SKG research, instead of being exclusive to a single task, domain, or dataset. We use UnifiedSKG to benchmark T5 with different sizes and show that T5, with simple modifications when necessary, achieves state-of-the-art performance on almost all of the 21 tasks. We further demonstrate that multi-task prefix-tuning improves the performance on most tasks, largely improving the overall performance. UnifiedSKG also facilitates the investigation of zero-shot and few-shot learning, and we show that T0, GPT-3, and Codex struggle in zero-shot and few-shot learning for SKG. We also use UnifiedSKG to conduct a series of controlled experiments on structured knowledge encoding variants across SKG tasks. UnifiedSKG is easily extensible to more tasks, and it is open-sourced at https://github.com/hkunlp/unifiedskg.

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Leveraging Locality in Abstractive Text Summarization
Yixin Liu | Ansong Ni | Linyong Nan | Budhaditya Deb | Chenguang Zhu | Ahmed Hassan Awadallah | Dragomir Radev
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Neural attention models have achieved significant improvements on many natural language processing tasks. However, the quadratic memory complexity of the self-attention module with respect to the input length hinders their applications in long text summarization. Instead of designing more efficient attention modules, we approach this problem by investigating if models with a restricted context can have competitive performance compared with the memory-efficient attention models that maintain a global context by treating the input as a single sequence. Our model is applied to individual pages, which contain parts of inputs grouped by the principle of locality, during both the encoding and decoding stages. We empirically investigated three kinds of locality in text summarization at different levels of granularity, ranging from sentences to documents. Our experimental results show that our model has a better performance compared with strong baseline models with efficient attention modules, and our analysis provides further insights into our locality-aware modeling strategy.

2021

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Mitigating False-Negative Contexts in Multi-document Question Answering with Retrieval Marginalization
Ansong Ni | Matt Gardner | Pradeep Dasigi
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Question Answering (QA) tasks requiring information from multiple documents often rely on a retrieval model to identify relevant information for reasoning. The retrieval model is typically trained to maximize the likelihood of the labeled supporting evidence. However, when retrieving from large text corpora such as Wikipedia, the correct answer can often be obtained from multiple evidence candidates. Moreover, not all such candidates are labeled as positive during annotation, rendering the training signal weak and noisy. This problem is exacerbated when the questions are unanswerable or when the answers are Boolean, since the model cannot rely on lexical overlap to make a connection between the answer and supporting evidence. We develop a new parameterization of set-valued retrieval that handles unanswerable queries, and we show that marginalizing over this set during training allows a model to mitigate false negatives in supporting evidence annotations. We test our method on two multi-document QA datasets, IIRC and HotpotQA. On IIRC, we show that joint modeling with marginalization improves model performance by 5.5 F1 points and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance of 50.5 F1. We also show that retrieval marginalization results in 4.1 QA F1 improvement over a non-marginalized baseline on HotpotQA in the fullwiki setting.

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SummerTime: Text Summarization Toolkit for Non-experts
Ansong Ni | Zhangir Azerbayev | Mutethia Mutuma | Troy Feng | Yusen Zhang | Tao Yu | Ahmed Hassan Awadallah | Dragomir Radev
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Recent advances in summarization provide models that can generate summaries of higher quality. Such models now exist for a number of summarization tasks, including query-based summarization, dialogue summarization, and multi-document summarization. While such models and tasks are rapidly growing in the research field, it has also become challenging for non-experts to keep track of them. To make summarization methods more accessible to a wider audience, we develop SummerTime by rethinking the summarization task from the perspective of an NLP non-expert. SummerTime is a complete toolkit for text summarization, including various models, datasets, and evaluation metrics, for a full spectrum of summarization-related tasks. SummerTime integrates with libraries designed for NLP researchers, and enables users with easy-to-use APIs. With SummerTime, users can locate pipeline solutions and search for the best model with their own data, and visualize the differences, all with a few lines of code. We also provide explanations for models and evaluation metrics to help users understand the model behaviors and select models that best suit their needs. Our library, along with a notebook demo, is available at https://github.com/Yale-LILY/SummerTime.

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An Exploratory Study on Long Dialogue Summarization: What Works and What’s Next
Yusen Zhang | Ansong Ni | Tao Yu | Rui Zhang | Chenguang Zhu | Budhaditya Deb | Asli Celikyilmaz | Ahmed Hassan Awadallah | Dragomir Radev
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Dialogue summarization helps readers capture salient information from long conversations in meetings, interviews, and TV series. However, real-world dialogues pose a great challenge to current summarization models, as the dialogue length typically exceeds the input limits imposed by recent transformer-based pre-trained models, and the interactive nature of dialogues makes relevant information more context-dependent and sparsely distributed than news articles. In this work, we perform a comprehensive study on long dialogue summarization by investigating three strategies to deal with the lengthy input problem and locate relevant information: (1) extended transformer models such as Longformer, (2) retrieve-then-summarize pipeline models with several dialogue utterance retrieval methods, and (3) hierarchical dialogue encoding models such as HMNet. Our experimental results on three long dialogue datasets (QMSum, MediaSum, SummScreen) show that the retrieve-then-summarize pipeline models yield the best performance. We also demonstrate that the summary quality can be further improved with a stronger retrieval model and pretraining on proper external summarization datasets.