@inproceedings{cao-wang-2021-attention,
    title = "Attention Head Masking for Inference Time Content Selection in Abstractive Summarization",
    author = "Cao, Shuyang  and
      Wang, Lu",
    editor = "Toutanova, Kristina  and
      Rumshisky, Anna  and
      Zettlemoyer, Luke  and
      Hakkani-Tur, Dilek  and
      Beltagy, Iz  and
      Bethard, Steven  and
      Cotterell, Ryan  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Zhou, Yichao",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies",
    month = jun,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2021.naacl-main.397/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.397",
    pages = "5008--5016",
    abstract = "How can we effectively inform content selection in Transformer-based abstractive summarization models? In this work, we present a simple-yet-effective attention head masking technique, which is applied on encoder-decoder attentions to pinpoint salient content at inference time. Using attention head masking, we are able to reveal the relation between encoder-decoder attentions and content selection behaviors of summarization models. We then demonstrate its effectiveness on three document summarization datasets based on both in-domain and cross-domain settings. Importantly, our models outperform prior state-of-the-art models on CNN/Daily Mail and New York Times datasets. Moreover, our inference-time masking technique is also data-efficient, requiring only 20{\%} of the training samples to outperform BART fine-tuned on the full CNN/DailyMail dataset."
}