@inproceedings{arumae-liu-2019-guiding,
    title = "Guiding Extractive Summarization with Question-Answering Rewards",
    author = "Arumae, Kristjan  and
      Liu, Fei",
    editor = "Burstein, Jill  and
      Doran, Christy  and
      Solorio, Thamar",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North {A}merican Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)",
    month = jun,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Minneapolis, Minnesota",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/N19-1264/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/N19-1264",
    pages = "2566--2577",
    abstract = "Highlighting while reading is a natural behavior for people to track salient content of a document. It would be desirable to teach an extractive summarizer to do the same. However, a major obstacle to the development of a supervised summarizer is the lack of ground-truth. Manual annotation of extraction units is cost-prohibitive, whereas acquiring labels by automatically aligning human abstracts and source documents can yield inferior results. In this paper we describe a novel framework to guide a supervised, extractive summarization system with question-answering rewards. We argue that quality summaries should serve as document surrogates to answer important questions, and such question-answer pairs can be conveniently obtained from human abstracts. The system learns to promote summaries that are informative, fluent, and perform competitively on question-answering. Our results compare favorably with those reported by strong summarization baselines as evaluated by automatic metrics and human assessors."
}