No Arabic abstract
Contemporary works on abstractive text summarization have focused primarily on high-resource languages like English, mostly due to the limited availability of datasets for low/mid-resource ones. In this work, we present XL-Sum, a comprehensive and diverse dataset comprising 1 million professionally annotated article-summary pairs from BBC, extracted using a set of carefully designed heuristics. The dataset covers 44 languages ranging from low to high-resource, for many of which no public dataset is currently available. XL-Sum is highly abstractive, concise, and of high quality, as indicated by human and intrinsic evaluation. We fine-tune mT5, a state-of-the-art pretrained multilingual model, with XL-Sum and experiment on multilingual and low-resource summarization tasks. XL-Sum induces competitive results compared to the ones obtained using similar monolingual datasets: we show higher than 11 ROUGE-2 scores on 10 languages we benchmark on, with some of them exceeding 15, as obtained by multilingual training. Additionally, training on low-resource languages individually also provides competitive performance. To the best of our knowledge, XL-Sum is the largest abstractive summarization dataset in terms of the number of samples collected from a single source and the number of languages covered. We are releasing our dataset and models to encourage future research on multilingual abstractive summarization. The resources can be found at url{https://github.com/csebuetnlp/xl-sum}.
In this paper, we study abstractive summarization for open-domain videos. Unlike the traditional text news summarization, the goal is less to compress text information but rather to provide a fluent textual summary of information that has been collected and fused from different source modalities, in our case video and audio transcripts (or text). We show how a multi-source sequence-to-sequence model with hierarchical attention can integrate information from different modalities into a coherent output, compare various models trained with different modalities and present pilot experiments on the How2 corpus of instructional videos. We also propose a new evaluation metric (Content F1) for abstractive summarization task that measures semantic adequacy rather than fluency of the summaries, which is covered by metrics like ROUGE and BLEU.
We propose a selective encoding model to extend the sequence-to-sequence framework for abstractive sentence summarization. It consists of a sentence encoder, a selective gate network, and an attention equipped decoder. The sentence encoder and decoder are built with recurrent neural networks. The selective gate network constructs a second level sentence representation by controlling the information flow from encoder to decoder. The second level representation is tailored for sentence summarization task, which leads to better performance. We evaluate our model on the English Gigaword, DUC 2004 and MSR abstractive sentence summarization datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed selective encoding model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline models.
Pre-trained language models have recently advanced abstractive summarization. These models are further fine-tuned on human-written references before summary generation in test time. In this work, we propose the first application of transductive learning to summarization. In this paradigm, a model can learn from the test sets input before inference. To perform transduction, we propose to utilize input document summarizing sentences to construct references for learning in test time. These sentences are often compressed and fused to form abstractive summaries and provide omitted details and additional context to the reader. We show that our approach yields state-of-the-art results on CNN/DM and NYT datasets. For instance, we achieve over 1 ROUGE-L point improvement on CNN/DM. Further, we show the benefits of transduction from older to more recent news. Finally, through human and automatic evaluation, we show that our summaries become more abstractive and coherent.
Sentences produced by abstractive summarization systems can be ungrammatical and fail to preserve the original meanings, despite being locally fluent. In this paper we propose to remedy this problem by jointly generating a sentence and its syntactic dependency parse while performing abstraction. If generating a word can introduce an erroneous relation to the summary, the behavior must be discouraged. The proposed method thus holds promise for producing grammatical sentences and encouraging the summary to stay true-to-original. Our contributions of this work are twofold. First, we present a novel neural architecture for abstractive summarization that combines a sequential decoder with a tree-based decoder in a synchronized manner to generate a summary sentence and its syntactic parse. Secondly, we describe a novel human evaluation protocol to assess if, and to what extent, a summary remains true to its original meanings. We evaluate our method on a number of summarization datasets and demonstrate competitive results against strong baselines.
Podcast summary, an important factor affecting end-users listening decisions, has often been considered a critical feature in podcast recommendation systems, as well as many downstream applications. Existing abstractive summarization approaches are mainly built on fine-tuned models on professionally edited texts such as CNN and DailyMail news. Different from news, podcasts are often longer, more colloquial and conversational, and noisier with contents on commercials and sponsorship, which makes automatic podcast summarization extremely challenging. This paper presents a baseline analysis of podcast summarization using the Spotify Podcast Dataset provided by TREC 2020. It aims to help researchers understand current state-of-the-art pre-trained models and hence build a foundation for creating better models.