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An Entity-Driven Framework for Abstractive Summarization (arxiv.org)
3 points by sel1 on Sep 7, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: It first picks key sentences using the people, places, and things they mention, then compresses and rewrites them into an abstract, trained to reward clear, coherent wording. It beat the previous best systems on quality and coherence scores, and human judges preferred its summaries.

Abstract

Abstractive summarization systems aim to produce more coherent and concise summaries than their extractive counterparts. Popular neural models have achieved impressive results for single-document summarization, yet their outputs are often incoherent and unfaithful to the input. In this paper, we introduce SENECA, a novel System for ENtity-drivEn Coherent Abstractive summarization framework that leverages entity information to generate informative and coherent abstracts. Our framework takes a two-step approach: (1) an entity-aware content selection module first identifies salient sentences from the input, then (2) an abstract generation module conducts cross-sentence information compression and abstraction to generate the final summary, which is trained with rewards to promote coherence, conciseness, and clarity. The two components are further connected using reinforcement learning. Automatic evaluation shows that our model significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art on ROUGE and our proposed coherence measures on New York Times and CNN/Daily Mail datasets. Human judges further rate our system summaries as more informative and coherent than those by popular summarization models.

Eva Sharma, Luyang Huang, Zhe Hu, Lu Wang
arXiv:1909.02059 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Sep 4, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Proceedings of the 2019 Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing Conference and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP-2019) (19 pages)

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