2021
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Does Pretraining for Summarization Require Knowledge Transfer?
Kundan Krishna
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Jeffrey Bigham
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Zachary C. Lipton
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Pretraining techniques leveraging enormous datasets have driven recent advances in text summarization. While folk explanations suggest that knowledge transfer accounts for pretraining’s benefits, little is known about why it works or what makes a pretraining task or dataset suitable. In this paper, we challenge the knowledge transfer story, showing that pretraining on documents consisting of character n-grams selected at random, we can nearly match the performance of models pretrained on real corpora. This work holds the promise of eliminating upstream corpora, which may alleviate some concerns over offensive language, bias, and copyright issues. To see whether the small residual benefit of using real data could be accounted for by the structure of the pretraining task, we design several tasks motivated by a qualitative study of summarization corpora. However, these tasks confer no appreciable benefit, leaving open the possibility of a small role for knowledge transfer.
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Generating SOAP Notes from Doctor-Patient Conversations Using Modular Summarization Techniques
Kundan Krishna
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Sopan Khosla
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Jeffrey Bigham
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Zachary C. Lipton
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Following each patient visit, physicians draft long semi-structured clinical summaries called SOAP notes. While invaluable to clinicians and researchers, creating digital SOAP notes is burdensome, contributing to physician burnout. In this paper, we introduce the first complete pipelines to leverage deep summarization models to generate these notes based on transcripts of conversations between physicians and patients. After exploring a spectrum of methods across the extractive-abstractive spectrum, we propose Cluster2Sent, an algorithm that (i) extracts important utterances relevant to each summary section; (ii) clusters together related utterances; and then (iii) generates one summary sentence per cluster. Cluster2Sent outperforms its purely abstractive counterpart by 8 ROUGE-1 points, and produces significantly more factual and coherent sentences as assessed by expert human evaluators. For reproducibility, we demonstrate similar benefits on the publicly available AMI dataset. Our results speak to the benefits of structuring summaries into sections and annotating supporting evidence when constructing summarization corpora.
2018
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Vocabulary Tailored Summary Generation
Kundan Krishna
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Aniket Murhekar
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Saumitra Sharma
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Balaji Vasan Srinivasan
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Neural sequence-to-sequence models have been successfully extended for summary generation.However, existing frameworks generate a single summary for a given input and do not tune the summaries towards any additional constraints/preferences. Such a tunable framework is desirable to account for linguistic preferences of the specific audience who will consume the summary. In this paper, we propose a neural framework to generate summaries constrained to a vocabulary-defined linguistic preferences of a target audience. The proposed method accounts for the generation context by tuning the summary words at the time of generation. Our evaluations indicate that the proposed approach tunes summaries to the target vocabulary while still maintaining a superior summary quality against a state-of-the-art word embedding based lexical substitution algorithm, suggesting the feasibility of the proposed approach. We demonstrate two applications of the proposed approach - to generate understandable summaries with simpler words, and readable summaries with shorter words.
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Corpus-based Content Construction
Balaji Vasan Srinivasan
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Pranav Maneriker
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Kundan Krishna
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Natwar Modani
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Enterprise content writers are engaged in writing textual content for various purposes. Often, the text being written may already be present in the enterprise corpus in the form of past articles and can be re-purposed for the current needs. In the absence of suitable tools, authors manually curate/create such content (sometimes from scratch) which reduces their productivity. To address this, we propose an automatic approach to generate an initial version of the author’s intended text based on an input content snippet. Starting with a set of extracted textual fragments related to the snippet based on the query words in it, the proposed approach builds the desired text from these fragment by simultaneously optimizing the information coverage, relevance, diversity and coherence in the generated content. Evaluations on standard datasets shows improved performance against existing baselines on several metrics.
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Generating Topic-Oriented Summaries Using Neural Attention
Kundan Krishna
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Balaji Vasan Srinivasan
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Summarizing a document requires identifying the important parts of the document with an objective of providing a quick overview to a reader. However, a long article can span several topics and a single summary cannot do justice to all the topics. Further, the interests of readers can vary and the notion of importance can change across them. Existing summarization algorithms generate a single summary and are not capable of generating multiple summaries tuned to the interests of the readers. In this paper, we propose an attention based RNN framework to generate multiple summaries of a single document tuned to different topics of interest. Our method outperforms existing baselines and our results suggest that the attention of generative networks can be successfully biased to look at sentences relevant to a topic and effectively used to generate topic-tuned summaries.