1,039 research outputs found
Generating Abstractive Summaries from Meeting Transcripts
Summaries of meetings are very important as they convey the essential content
of discussions in a concise form. Generally, it is time consuming to read and
understand the whole documents. Therefore, summaries play an important role as
the readers are interested in only the important context of discussions. In
this work, we address the task of meeting document summarization. Automatic
summarization systems on meeting conversations developed so far have been
primarily extractive, resulting in unacceptable summaries that are hard to
read. The extracted utterances contain disfluencies that affect the quality of
the extractive summaries. To make summaries much more readable, we propose an
approach to generating abstractive summaries by fusing important content from
several utterances. We first separate meeting transcripts into various topic
segments, and then identify the important utterances in each segment using a
supervised learning approach. The important utterances are then combined
together to generate a one-sentence summary. In the text generation step, the
dependency parses of the utterances in each segment are combined together to
create a directed graph. The most informative and well-formed sub-graph
obtained by integer linear programming (ILP) is selected to generate a
one-sentence summary for each topic segment. The ILP formulation reduces
disfluencies by leveraging grammatical relations that are more prominent in
non-conversational style of text, and therefore generates summaries that is
comparable to human-written abstractive summaries. Experimental results show
that our method can generate more informative summaries than the baselines. In
addition, readability assessments by human judges as well as log-likelihood
estimates obtained from the dependency parser show that our generated summaries
are significantly readable and well-formed.Comment: 10 pages, Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Symposium on Document
Engineering, DocEng' 201
Adapting the Neural Encoder-Decoder Framework from Single to Multi-Document Summarization
Generating a text abstract from a set of documents remains a challenging
task. The neural encoder-decoder framework has recently been exploited to
summarize single documents, but its success can in part be attributed to the
availability of large parallel data automatically acquired from the Web. In
contrast, parallel data for multi-document summarization are scarce and costly
to obtain. There is a pressing need to adapt an encoder-decoder model trained
on single-document summarization data to work with multiple-document input. In
this paper, we present an initial investigation into a novel adaptation method.
It exploits the maximal marginal relevance method to select representative
sentences from multi-document input, and leverages an abstractive
encoder-decoder model to fuse disparate sentences to an abstractive summary.
The adaptation method is robust and itself requires no training data. Our
system compares favorably to state-of-the-art extractive and abstractive
approaches judged by automatic metrics and human assessors.Comment: 11 page
Language as a Latent Variable: Discrete Generative Models for Sentence Compression
In this work we explore deep generative models of text in which the latent
representation of a document is itself drawn from a discrete language model
distribution. We formulate a variational auto-encoder for inference in this
model and apply it to the task of compressing sentences. In this application
the generative model first draws a latent summary sentence from a background
language model, and then subsequently draws the observed sentence conditioned
on this latent summary. In our empirical evaluation we show that generative
formulations of both abstractive and extractive compression yield
state-of-the-art results when trained on a large amount of supervised data.
Further, we explore semi-supervised compression scenarios where we show that it
is possible to achieve performance competitive with previously proposed
supervised models while training on a fraction of the supervised data.Comment: EMNLP 201
A Neural Attention Model for Abstractive Sentence Summarization
Summarization based on text extraction is inherently limited, but
generation-style abstractive methods have proven challenging to build. In this
work, we propose a fully data-driven approach to abstractive sentence
summarization. Our method utilizes a local attention-based model that generates
each word of the summary conditioned on the input sentence. While the model is
structurally simple, it can easily be trained end-to-end and scales to a large
amount of training data. The model shows significant performance gains on the
DUC-2004 shared task compared with several strong baselines.Comment: Proceedings of EMNLP 201
Adapting End-to-End Speech Recognition for Readable Subtitles
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are primarily evaluated on
transcription accuracy. However, in some use cases such as subtitling, verbatim
transcription would reduce output readability given limited screen size and
reading time. Therefore, this work focuses on ASR with output compression, a
task challenging for supervised approaches due to the scarcity of training
data. We first investigate a cascaded system, where an unsupervised compression
model is used to post-edit the transcribed speech. We then compare several
methods of end-to-end speech recognition under output length constraints. The
experiments show that with limited data far less than needed for training a
model from scratch, we can adapt a Transformer-based ASR model to incorporate
both transcription and compression capabilities. Furthermore, the best
performance in terms of WER and ROUGE scores is achieved by explicitly modeling
the length constraints within the end-to-end ASR system.Comment: IWSLT 202
Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization via Phrase Selection and Merging
We propose an abstraction-based multi-document summarization framework that
can construct new sentences by exploring more fine-grained syntactic units than
sentences, namely, noun/verb phrases. Different from existing abstraction-based
approaches, our method first constructs a pool of concepts and facts
represented by phrases from the input documents. Then new sentences are
generated by selecting and merging informative phrases to maximize the salience
of phrases and meanwhile satisfy the sentence construction constraints. We
employ integer linear optimization for conducting phrase selection and merging
simultaneously in order to achieve the global optimal solution for a summary.
Experimental results on the benchmark data set TAC 2011 show that our framework
outperforms the state-of-the-art models under automated pyramid evaluation
metric, and achieves reasonably well results on manual linguistic quality
evaluation.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, accepted as a full paper at ACL 201
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