Long Document Summarization in a Low Resource Setting using Pretrained Language Models

Ahsaas Bajaj, Pavitra Dangati, Kalpesh Krishna, Pradhiksha Ashok Kumar, Rheeya Uppaal, Bradford Windsor, Eliot Brenner, Dominic Dotterrer, Rajarshi Das, Andrew McCallum


Abstract
Abstractive summarization is the task of compressing a long document into a coherent short document while retaining salient information. Modern abstractive summarization methods are based on deep neural networks which often require large training datasets. Since collecting summarization datasets is an expensive and time-consuming task, practical industrial settings are usually low-resource. In this paper, we study a challenging low-resource setting of summarizing long legal briefs with an average source document length of 4268 words and only 120 available (document, summary) pairs. To account for data scarcity, we used a modern pre-trained abstractive summarizer BART, which only achieves 17.9 ROUGE-L as it struggles with long documents. We thus attempt to compress these long documents by identifying salient sentences in the source which best ground the summary, using a novel algorithm based on GPT-2 language model perplexity scores, that operates within the low resource regime. On feeding the compressed documents to BART, we observe a 6.0 ROUGE-L improvement. Our method also beats several competitive salience detection baselines. Furthermore, the identified salient sentences tend to agree with independent human labeling by domain experts.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-srw.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
71–80
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-srw.7
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-srw.7
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ahsaas Bajaj, Pavitra Dangati, Kalpesh Krishna, Pradhiksha Ashok Kumar, Rheeya Uppaal, Bradford Windsor, Eliot Brenner, Dominic Dotterrer, Rajarshi Das, and Andrew McCallum. 2021. Long Document Summarization in a Low Resource Setting using Pretrained Language Models. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop, pages 71–80, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Long Document Summarization in a Low Resource Setting using Pretrained Language Models (Bajaj et al., ACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/2021.acl-srw.7.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2021.acl-srw.7.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
Data
CNN/Daily MailMultiNLI