𝜇PLAN: Summarizing using a Content Plan as Cross-Lingual Bridge
Fantine Huot, Joshua Maynez, Chris Alberti, Reinald Kim Amplayo, Priyanka Agrawal, Constanza Fierro, Shashi Narayan, Mirella Lapata
Abstract
Cross-lingual summarization aims to generate a summary in one languagegiven input in a different language, allowing for the dissemination ofrelevant content among different language speaking populations. Thetask is challenging mainly due to the paucity of cross-lingualdatasets and the compounded difficulty of summarizing andtranslating.This work presents 𝜇PLAN, an approach to cross-lingual summarization that uses an intermediate planning step as a cross-lingual bridge. We formulate the plan as a sequence of entities capturing thesummary’s content and the order in which it should becommunicated. Importantly, our plans abstract from surface form: usinga multilingual knowledge base, we align entities to their canonicaldesignation across languages and generate the summary conditioned onthis cross-lingual bridge and the input. Automatic and human evaluation on the XWikis dataset (across four language pairs) demonstrates that our planning objective achieves state-of-the-art performance interms of informativeness and faithfulness. Moreover, 𝜇PLAN modelsimprove the zero-shot transfer to new cross-lingual language pairscompared to baselines without a planning component.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.eacl-long.131
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- March
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- St. Julian’s, Malta
- Editors:
- Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
- Venue:
- EACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2146–2163
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.131
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Fantine Huot, Joshua Maynez, Chris Alberti, Reinald Kim Amplayo, Priyanka Agrawal, Constanza Fierro, Shashi Narayan, and Mirella Lapata. 2024. 𝜇PLAN: Summarizing using a Content Plan as Cross-Lingual Bridge. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2146–2163, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- 𝜇PLAN: Summarizing using a Content Plan as Cross-Lingual Bridge (Huot et al., EACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl-24-ws-corrections/2024.eacl-long.131.pdf