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Summary Level Training of Sentence Rewriting for Abstractive Summarization (arxiv.org)
2 points by sel1 on Sep 22, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A summarizer that picks key sentences and rewrites them is trained by scoring the whole finished summary against the human one, instead of grading each sentence separately. This beat earlier versions on two news collections and transferred better to a third.

Abstract

As an attempt to combine extractive and abstractive summarization, Sentence Rewriting models adopt the strategy of extracting salient sentences from a document first and then paraphrasing the selected ones to generate a summary. However, the existing models in this framework mostly rely on sentence-level rewards or suboptimal labels, causing a mismatch between a training objective and evaluation metric. In this paper, we present a novel training signal that directly maximizes summary-level ROUGE scores through reinforcement learning. In addition, we incorporate BERT into our model, making good use of its ability on natural language understanding. In extensive experiments, we show that a combination of our proposed model and training procedure obtains new state-of-the-art performance on both CNN/Daily Mail and New York Times datasets. We also demonstrate that it generalizes better on DUC-2002 test set.

Sanghwan Bae, Taeuk Kim, Jihoon Kim, Sang-goo Lee
arXiv:1909.08752 · cs.CL, cs.IR, cs.LG · submitted Sep 19, 2019 · updated Sep 26, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · EMNLP 2019 Workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization

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