No Arabic abstract
Unlike well-structured text, such as news reports and encyclopedia articles, dialogue content often comes from two or more interlocutors, exchanging information with each other. In such a scenario, the topic of a conversation can vary upon progression and the key information for a certain topic is often scattered across multiple utterances of different speakers, which poses challenges to abstractly summarize dialogues. To capture the various topic information of a conversation and outline salient facts for the captured topics, this work proposes two topic-aware contrastive learning objectives, namely coherence detection and sub-summary generation objectives, which are expected to implicitly model the topic change and handle information scattering challenges for the dialogue summarization task. The proposed contrastive objectives are framed as auxiliary tasks for the primary dialogue summarization task, united via an alternative parameter updating strategy. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed simple method significantly outperforms strong baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art performance. The code and trained models are publicly available via href{https://github.com/Junpliu/ConDigSum}{https://github.com/Junpliu/ConDigSum}.
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.
Summarizing conversations via neural approaches has been gaining research traction lately, yet it is still challenging to obtain practical solutions. Examples of such challenges include unstructured information exchange in dialogues, informal interactions between speakers, and dynamic role changes of speakers as the dialogue evolves. Many of such challenges result in complex coreference links. Therefore, in this work, we investigate different approaches to explicitly incorporate coreference information in neural abstractive dialogue summarization models to tackle the aforementioned challenges. Experimental results show that the proposed approaches achieve state-of-the-art performance, implying it is useful to utilize coreference information in dialogue summarization. Evaluation results on factual correctness suggest such coreference-aware models are better at tracing the information flow among interlocutors and associating accurate status/actions with the corresponding interlocutors and person mentions.
In this paper, we aim to improve abstractive dialogue summarization quality and, at the same time, enable granularity control. Our model has two primary components and stages: 1) a two-stage generation strategy that generates a preliminary summary sketch serving as the basis for the final summary. This summary sketch provides a weakly supervised signal in the form of pseudo-labeled interrogative pronoun categories and key phrases extracted using a constituency parser. 2) A simple strategy to control the granularity of the final summary, in that our model can automatically determine or control the number of generated summary sentences for a given dialogue by predicting and highlighting different text spans from the source text. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the largest dialogue summarization corpus SAMSum, with as high as 50.79 in ROUGE-L score. In addition, we conduct a case study and show competitive human evaluation results and controllability to human-annotated summaries.
In a customer service system, dialogue summarization can boost service efficiency by automatically creating summaries for long spoken dialogues in which customers and agents try to address issues about specific topics. In this work, we focus on topic-oriented dialogue summarization, which generates highly abstractive summaries that preserve the main ideas from dialogues. In spoken dialogues, abundant dialogue noise and common semantics could obscure the underlying informative content, making the general topic modeling approaches difficult to apply. In addition, for customer service, role-specific information matters and is an indispensable part of a summary. To effectively perform topic modeling on dialogues and capture multi-role information, in this work we propose a novel topic-augmented two-stage dialogue summarizer (TDS) jointly with a saliency-aware neural topic model (SATM) for topic-oriented summarization of customer service dialogues. Comprehensive studies on a real-world Chinese customer service dataset demonstrated the superiority of our method against several strong baselines.
We introduce a new approach for abstractive text summarization, Topic-Guided Abstractive Summarization, which calibrates long-range dependencies from topic-level features with globally salient content. The idea is to incorporate neural topic modeling with a Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model in a joint learning framework. This design can learn and preserve the global semantics of the document, which can provide additional contextual guidance for capturing important ideas of the document, thereby enhancing the generation of summary. We conduct extensive experiments on two datasets and the results show that our proposed model outperforms many extractive and abstractive systems in terms of both ROUGE measurements and human evaluation. Our code is available at: https://github.com/chz816/tas.