Contrastive Learning has emerged as a powerful representation learning method and facilitates various downstream tasks especially when supervised data is limited. How to construct efficient contrastive samples through data augmentation is key to its success. Unlike vision tasks, the data augmentation method for contrastive learning has not been investigated sufficiently in language tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to construct contrastive samples for language tasks using text summarization. We use these samples for supervised contrastive learning to gain better text representations which greatly benefit text classification tasks with limited annotations. To further improve the method, we mix up samples from different classes and add an extra regularization, named Mixsum, in addition to the cross-entropy-loss. Experiments on real-world text classification datasets (Amazon-5, Yelp-5, AG News, and IMDb) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed contrastive learning framework with summarization-based data augmentation and Mixsum regularization.

Evaluation of a document summarization system has been a critical factor to impact the success of the summarization task. Previous approaches, such as ROUGE, mainly consider the informativeness of the assessed summary and require human-generated references for each test summary. In this work, we propose to evaluate the summary qualities without reference summaries by unsupervised contrastive learning. Specifically, we design a new metric which covers both linguistic qualities and semantic informativeness based on BERT. To learn the metric, for each summary, we construct different types of negative samples with respect to different aspects of the summary qualities, and train our model with a ranking loss. Experiments on Newsroom and CNN/Daily Mail demonstrate that our new evaluation method outperforms other metrics even without reference summaries. Furthermore, we show that our method is general and transferable across datasets.