Extractive summarization can produce faithful summaries but often requires additional constraints such as a desired summary length. Traditional sentence compression models do not typically consider the constraints because of their restricted model abilities, which require model modifications for coping with them. To bridge this gap, we propose Instruction-based Compression (InstructCMP), an approach to the sentence compression task that can consider the length constraint through instructions by leveraging the zero-shot task-solving abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). For this purpose, we created new evaluation datasets by transforming traditional sentence compression datasets into an instruction format. By using the datasets, we first reveal that the current LLMs still face challenges in accurately controlling the length for a compressed text. To address this issue, we propose an approach named length priming, that incorporates additional length information into the instructions without external resources. While the length priming effectively works in a zero-shot setting, a training dataset with the instructions would further improve the ability of length control. Thus, we additionally created a training dataset in an instruction format to fine-tune the model on it. Experimental results and analysis show that applying the length priming significantly improves performances of InstructCMP in both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings without the need of any model modifications.

Recently, we can obtain a practical abstractive document summarization model by fine-tuning a pre-trained language model (PLM). Since the pre-training for PLMs does not consider summarization-specific information such as the target summary length, there is a gap between the pre-training and fine-tuning for PLMs in summarization tasks. To fill the gap, we propose a method for enabling the model to understand the summarization-specific information by predicting the summary length in the encoder and generating a summary of the predicted length in the decoder in fine-tuning. Experimental results on the WikiHow, NYT, and CNN/DM datasets showed that our methods improve ROUGE scores from BART by generating summaries of appropriate lengths. Further, we observed about 3.0, 1,5, and 3.1 point improvements for ROUGE-1, -2, and -L, respectively, from GSum on the WikiHow dataset. Human evaluation results also showed that our methods improve the informativeness and conciseness of summaries.

Sentence extractive summarization shortens a document by selecting sentences for a summary while preserving its important contents. However, constructing a coherent and informative summary is difficult using a pre-trained BERT-based encoder since it is not explicitly trained for representing the information of sentences in a document. We propose a nested tree-based extractive summarization model on RoBERTa (NeRoBERTa), where nested tree structures consist of syntactic and discourse trees in a given document. Experimental results on the CNN/DailyMail dataset showed that NeRoBERTa outperforms baseline models in ROUGE. Human evaluation results also showed that NeRoBERTa achieves significantly better scores than the baselines in terms of coherence and yields comparable scores to the state-of-the-art models.

One way to enhance user engagement in search engines is to suggest interesting facts to the user. Although relationships between persons are important as a target for text mining, there are few effective approaches for extracting the interesting relationships between persons. We therefore propose a method for extracting interesting relationships between persons from natural language texts by focusing on their surprisingness. Our method first extracts all personal relationships from dependency trees for the texts and then calculates surprise scores for distributed representations of the extracted relationships in an unsupervised manner. The unique point of our method is that it does not require any labeled dataset with annotation for the surprising personal relationships. The results of the human evaluation show that the proposed method could extract more interesting relationships between persons from Japanese Wikipedia articles than a popularity-based baseline method. We demonstrate our proposed method as a chrome plugin on google search.

In the social media, users frequently use small images called emojis in their posts. Although using emojis in texts plays a key role in recent communication systems, less attention has been paid on their positions in the given texts, despite that users carefully choose and put an emoji that matches their post. Exploring positions of emojis in texts will enhance understanding of the relationship between emojis and texts. We extend an emoji label prediction task taking into account the information of emoji positions, by jointly learning the emoji position in a tweet to predict the emoji label. The results demonstrate that the position of emojis in texts is a good clue to boost the performance of emoji label prediction. Human evaluation validates that there exists a suitable emoji position in a tweet, and our proposed task is able to make tweets more fancy and natural. In addition, considering emoji position can further improve the performance for the irony detection task compared to the emoji label prediction. We also report the experimental results for the modified dataset, due to the problem of the original dataset for the first shared task to predict an emoji label in SemEval2018.

Recently, automatic trivia fact extraction has attracted much research interest. Modern search engines have begun to provide trivia facts as the information for entities because they can motivate more user engagement. In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised algorithm that automatically mines trivia facts for a given entity. Unlike previous studies, the proposed algorithm targets at a single Wikipedia article and leverages its hierarchical structure via top-down processing. Thus, the proposed algorithm offers two distinctive advantages: it does not incur high computation time, and it provides a domain-independent approach for extracting trivia facts. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is over 100 times faster than the existing method which considers Wikipedia categories. Human evaluation demonstrates that the proposed algorithm can mine better trivia facts regardless of the target entity domain and outperforms the existing methods.