Multi-Fact Correction in Abstractive Text Summarization
Yue Dong, Shuohang Wang, Zhe Gan, Yu Cheng, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Jingjing Liu
Abstract
Pre-trained neural abstractive summarization systems have dominated extractive strategies on news summarization performance, at least in terms of ROUGE. However, system-generated abstractive summaries often face the pitfall of factual inconsistency: generating incorrect facts with respect to the source text. To address this challenge, we propose Span-Fact, a suite of two factual correction models that leverages knowledge learned from question answering models to make corrections in system-generated summaries via span selection. Our models employ single or multi-masking strategies to either iteratively or auto-regressively replace entities in order to ensure semantic consistency w.r.t. the source text, while retaining the syntactic structure of summaries generated by abstractive summarization models. Experiments show that our models significantly boost the factual consistency of system-generated summaries without sacrificing summary quality in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluation.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.emnlp-main.749
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 9320–9331
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.749
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.749
- Cite (ACL):
- Yue Dong, Shuohang Wang, Zhe Gan, Yu Cheng, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, and Jingjing Liu. 2020. Multi-Fact Correction in Abstractive Text Summarization. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 9320–9331, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Multi-Fact Correction in Abstractive Text Summarization (Dong et al., EMNLP 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-xml-comments/2020.emnlp-main.749.pdf