For long document summarization, discourse structure is important to discern the key content of the text and the differences in importance level between sentences. Unfortunately, the integration of rhetorical structure theory (RST) into parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies for long document summarization remains unexplored. Therefore, this paper introduces RST-LoRA and proposes four RST-aware variants to explicitly incorporate RST into the LoRA model. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that incorporating the type and uncertainty of rhetorical relations can complementarily enhance the performance of LoRA in summarization tasks. Furthermore, the best-performing variant we introduced outperforms the vanilla LoRA and full-parameter fine-tuning models, as confirmed by multiple automatic and human evaluations, and even surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods.

Scientific news reports serve as a bridge, adeptly translating complex research articles into reports that resonate with the broader public. The automated generation of such narratives enhances the accessibility of scholarly insights. In this paper, we present a new corpus to facilitate this paradigm development. Our corpus comprises a parallel compilation of academic publications and their corresponding scientific news reports across nine disciplines. To demonstrate the utility and reliability of our dataset, we conduct an extensive analysis, highlighting the divergences in readability and brevity between scientific news narratives and academic manuscripts. We benchmark our dataset employing state-of-the-art text generation models. The evaluation process involves both automatic and human evaluation, which lays the groundwork for future explorations into the automated generation of scientific news reports. The dataset and code related to this work are available at https://dongqi.me/projects/SciNews.

For text summarization, the role of discourse structure is pivotal in discerning the core content of a text. Regrettably, prior studies on incorporating Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) into transformer-based summarization models only consider the nuclearity annotation, thereby overlooking the variety of discourse relation types. This paper introduces the ‘RSTformer’, a novel summarization model that comprehensively incorporates both the types and uncertainty of rhetorical relations. Our RST-attention mechanism, rooted in document-level rhetorical structure, is an extension of the recently devised Longformer framework. Through rigorous evaluation, the model proposed herein exhibits significant superiority over state-of-the-art models, as evidenced by its notable performance on several automatic metrics and human evaluation.

Large-scale language models, like ChatGPT, have garnered significant media attention and stunned the public with their remarkable capacity for generating coherent text from short natural language prompts. In this paper, we aim to conduct a systematic inspection of ChatGPT’s performance in two controllable generation tasks, with respect to ChatGPT’s ability to adapt its output to different target audiences (expert vs. layman) and writing styles (formal vs. informal). Additionally, we evaluate the faithfulness of the generated text, and compare the model’s performance with human-authored texts. Our findings indicate that the stylistic variations produced by humans are considerably larger than those demonstrated by ChatGPT, and the generated texts diverge from human samples in several characteristics, such as the distribution of word types. Moreover, we observe that ChatGPT sometimes incorporates factual errors or hallucinations when adapting the text to suit a specific style.

Existing syntax-enriched neural machine translation (NMT) models work either with the single most-likely unlabeled parse or the set of n-best unlabeled parses coming out of an external parser. Passing a single or n-best parses to the NMT model risks propagating parse errors. Furthermore, unlabeled parses represent only syntactic groupings without their linguistically relevant categories. In this paper we explore the question: Does passing both parser uncertainty and labeled syntactic knowledge to the Transformer improve its translation performance? This paper contributes a novel method for infusing the whole labeled dependency distributions (LDD) of the source sentence’s dependency forest into the self-attention mechanism of the encoder of the Transformer. A range of experimental results on three language pairs demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms both the vanilla Transformer as well as the single best-parse Transformer model across several evaluation metrics.

The Creative Summarization Shared Task at COLING 2022 aspires to generate summaries given long-form texts from creative writing. This paper presents the system architecture and the results of our participation in the Scriptbase track that focuses on generating movie plots given movie scripts. The core innovation in our model employs a two-stage hierarchical architecture for movie script summarization. In the first stage, a heuristic extraction method is applied to extract actions and essential dialogues, which reduces the average length of input movie scripts by 66% from about 24K to 8K tokens. In the second stage, a state-of-the-art encoder-decoder model, Longformer-Encoder-Decoder (LED), is trained with effective fine-tuning methods, BitFit and NoisyTune. Evaluations on the unseen test set indicate that our system outperforms both zero-shot LED baselines as well as other participants on various automatic metrics and ranks 1st in the Scriptbase track.