Exploring Explainable Selection to Control Abstractive Generation

It is a big challenge to model long-range input for document summarization. In this paper, we target using a select and generate paradigm to enhance the capability of selecting explainable contents (i.e., interpret the selection given its semantics, novelty, relevance) and then guiding to control the abstract generation. Specifically, a newly designed pair-wise extractor is proposed to capture the sentence pair interactions and their centrality. Furthermore, the generator is hybrid with the selected content and is jointly integrated with a pointer distribution that is derived from a sentence deployment's attention. The abstract generation can be controlled by an explainable mask matrix that determines to what extent the content can be included in the summary. Encoders are adaptable with both Transformer-based and BERT-based configurations. Overall, both results based on ROUGE metrics and human evaluation gain outperformance over several state-of-the-art models on two benchmark CNN/DailyMail and NYT datasets.

Concept Pointer Network for Abstractive Summarization

A quality abstractive summary should not only copy salient source texts as summaries but should also tend to generate new conceptual words to express concrete details. Inspired by the popular pointer generator sequence-to-sequence model, this paper presents a concept pointer network for improving these aspects of abstractive summarization. The network leverages knowledge-based, context-aware conceptualizations to derive an extended set of candidate concepts. The model then points to the most appropriate choice using both the concept set and original source text. This joint approach generates abstractive summaries with higher-level semantic concepts. The training model is also optimized in a way that adapts to different data, which is based on a novel method of distantly-supervised learning guided by reference summaries and testing set. Overall, the proposed approach provides statistically significant improvements over several state-of-the-art models on both the DUC-2004 and Gigaword datasets. A human evaluation of the model's abstractive abilities also supports the quality of the summaries produced within this framework.