No Arabic abstract
Meetings are a key component of human collaboration. As increasing numbers of meetings are recorded and transcribed, meeting summaries have become essential to remind those who may or may not have attended the meetings about the key decisions made and the tasks to be completed. However, it is hard to create a single short summary that covers all the content of a long meeting involving multiple people and topics. In order to satisfy the needs of different types of users, we define a new query-based multi-domain meeting summarization task, where models have to select and summarize relevant spans of meetings in response to a query, and we introduce QMSum, a new benchmark for this task. QMSum consists of 1,808 query-summary pairs over 232 meetings in multiple domains. Besides, we investigate a locate-then-summarize method and evaluate a set of strong summarization baselines on the task. Experimental results and manual analysis reveal that QMSum presents significant challenges in long meeting summarization for future research. Dataset is available at url{https://github.com/Yale-LILY/QMSum}.
With the abundance of automatic meeting transcripts, meeting summarization is of great interest to both participants and other parties. Traditional methods of summarizing meetings depend on complex multi-step pipelines that make joint optimization intractable. Meanwhile, there are a handful of deep neural models for text summarization and dialogue systems. However, the semantic structure and styles of meeting transcripts are quite different from articles and conversations. In this paper, we propose a novel abstractive summary network that adapts to the meeting scenario. We design a hierarchical structure to accommodate long meeting transcripts and a role vector to depict the difference among speakers. Furthermore, due to the inadequacy of meeting summary data, we pretrain the model on large-scale news summary data. Empirical results show that our model outperforms previous approaches in both automatic metrics and human evaluation. For example, on ICSI dataset, the ROUGE-1 score increases from 34.66% to 46.28%.
We introduce WikiLingua, a large-scale, multilingual dataset for the evaluation of crosslingual abstractive summarization systems. We extract article and summary pairs in 18 languages from WikiHow, a high quality, collaborative resource of how-to guides on a diverse set of topics written by human authors. We create gold-standard article-summary alignments across languages by aligning the images that are used to describe each how-to step in an article. As a set of baselines for further studies, we evaluate the performance of existing cross-lingual abstractive summarization methods on our dataset. We further propose a method for direct crosslingual summarization (i.e., without requiring translation at inference time) by leveraging synthetic data and Neural Machine Translation as a pre-training step. Our method significantly outperforms the baseline approaches, while being more cost efficient during inference.
Recently abstractive spoken language summarization raises emerging research interest, and neural sequence-to-sequence approaches have brought significant performance improvement. However, summarizing long meeting transcripts remains challenging. Due to the large length of source contents and targeted summaries, neural models are prone to be distracted on the context, and produce summaries with degraded quality. Moreover, pre-trained language models with input length limitations cannot be readily applied to long sequences. In this work, we first analyze the linguistic characteristics of meeting transcripts on a representative corpus, and find that the sentences comprising the summary correlate with the meeting agenda. Based on this observation, we propose a dynamic sliding window strategy for meeting summarization. Experimental results show that performance benefit from the proposed method, and outputs obtain higher factual consistency than the base model.
The progress in Query-focused Multi-Document Summarization (QMDS) has been limited by the lack of sufficient largescale high-quality training datasets. We present two QMDS training datasets, which we construct using two data augmentation methods: (1) transferring the commonly used single-document CNN/Daily Mail summarization dataset to create the QMDSCNN dataset, and (2) mining search-query logs to create the QMDSIR dataset. These two datasets have complementary properties, i.e., QMDSCNN has real summaries but queries are simulated, while QMDSIR has real queries but simulated summaries. To cover both these real summary and query aspects, we build abstractive end-to-end neural network models on the combined datasets that yield new state-of-the-art transfer results on DUC datasets. We also introduce new hierarchical encoders that enable a more efficient encoding of the query together with multiple documents. Empirical results demonstrate that our data augmentation and encoding methods outperform baseline models on automatic metrics, as well as on human evaluations along multiple attributes.
Presentations are critical for communication in all areas of our lives, yet the creation of slide decks is often tedious and time-consuming. There has been limited research aiming to automate the document-to-slides generation process and all face a critical challenge: no publicly available dataset for training and benchmarking. In this work, we first contribute a new dataset, SciDuet, consisting of pairs of papers and their corresponding slides decks from recent years NLP and ML conferences (e.g., ACL). Secondly, we present D2S, a novel system that tackles the document-to-slides task with a two-step approach: 1) Use slide titles to retrieve relevant and engaging text, figures, and tables; 2) Summarize the retrieved context into bullet points with long-form question answering. Our evaluation suggests that long-form QA outperforms state-of-the-art summarization baselines on both automated ROUGE metrics and qualitative human evaluation.