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On Extractive and Abstractive Neural Document Summarization with Transformer Language Models

Jonathan Pilault, Raymond Li, Sandeep Subramanian, Chris Pal


Abstract
We present a method to produce abstractive summaries of long documents that exceed several thousand words via neural abstractive summarization. We perform a simple extractive step before generating a summary, which is then used to condition the transformer language model on relevant information before being tasked with generating a summary. We also show that this approach produces more abstractive summaries compared to prior work that employs a copy mechanism while still achieving higher ROUGE scores. We provide extensive comparisons with strong baseline methods, prior state of the art work as well as multiple variants of our approach including those using only transformers, only extractive techniques and combinations of the two. We examine these models using four different summarization tasks and datasets: arXiv papers, PubMed papers, the Newsroom and BigPatent datasets. We find that transformer based methods produce summaries with fewer n-gram copies, leading to n-gram copying statistics that are more similar to human generated abstracts. We include a human evaluation, finding that transformers are ranked highly for coherence and fluency, but purely extractive methods score higher for informativeness and relevance. We hope that these architectures and experiments may serve as strong points of comparison for future work. Note: The abstract above was collaboratively written by the authors and one of the models presented in this paper based on an earlier draft of this paper.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.748
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9308–9319
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.748
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.748
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jonathan Pilault, Raymond Li, Sandeep Subramanian, and Chris Pal. 2020. On Extractive and Abstractive Neural Document Summarization with Transformer Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 9308–9319, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On Extractive and Abstractive Neural Document Summarization with Transformer Language Models (Pilault et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.748.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938995
Data
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