StructSum: Summarization via Structured Representations

Vidhisha Balachandran, Artidoro Pagnoni, Jay Yoon Lee, Dheeraj Rajagopal, Jaime Carbonell, Yulia Tsvetkov


Abstract
Abstractive text summarization aims at compressing the information of a long source document into a rephrased, condensed summary. Despite advances in modeling techniques, abstractive summarization models still suffer from several key challenges: (i) layout bias: they overfit to the style of training corpora; (ii) limited abstractiveness: they are optimized to copying n-grams from the source rather than generating novel abstractive summaries; (iii) lack of transparency: they are not interpretable. In this work, we propose a framework based on document-level structure induction for summarization to address these challenges. To this end, we propose incorporating latent and explicit dependencies across sentences in the source document into end-to-end single-document summarization models. Our framework complements standard encoder-decoder summarization models by augmenting them with rich structure-aware document representations based on implicitly learned (latent) structures and externally-derived linguistic (explicit) structures. We show that our summarization framework, trained on the CNN/DM dataset, improves the coverage of content in the source documents, generates more abstractive summaries by generating more novel n-grams, and incorporates interpretable sentence-level structures, while performing on par with standard baselines.
Anthology ID:
2021.eacl-main.220
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Paola Merlo, Jorg Tiedemann, Reut Tsarfaty
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2575–2585
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.220
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.220
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vidhisha Balachandran, Artidoro Pagnoni, Jay Yoon Lee, Dheeraj Rajagopal, Jaime Carbonell, and Yulia Tsvetkov. 2021. StructSum: Summarization via Structured Representations. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 2575–2585, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
StructSum: Summarization via Structured Representations (Balachandran et al., EACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2021.eacl-main.220.pdf
Code
 vidhishanair/structured_summarizer
Data
CNN/Daily Mail