Unsupervised Dual-Cascade Learning with Pseudo-Feedback Distillation for Query-based Extractive Summarization

We propose Dual-CES -- a novel unsupervised, query-focused, multi-document extractive summarizer. Dual-CES is designed to better handle the tradeoff between saliency and focus in summarization. To this end, Dual-CES employs a two-step dual-cascade optimization approach with saliency-based pseudo-feedback distillation. Overall, Dual-CES significantly outperforms all other state-of-the-art unsupervised alternatives. Dual-CES is even shown to be able to outperform strong supervised summarizers

Addressing Complex and Subjective Product-Related Queries with Customer Reviews

Online reviews are often our first port of call when considering products and purchases online. When evaluating a potential purchase, we may have a specific query in mind, e.g. `will this baby seat fit in the overhead compartment of a 747?' or `will I like this album if I liked Taylor Swift's 1989?'. To answer such questions we must either wade through huge volumes of consumer reviews hoping to find one that is relevant, or otherwise pose our question directly to the community via a Q/A system. In this paper we hope to fuse these two paradigms: given a large volume of previously answered queries about products, we hope to automatically learn whether a review of a product is relevant to a given query. We formulate this as a machine learning problem using a mixture-of-experts-type framework---here each review is an `expert' that gets to vote on the response to a particular query; simultaneously we learn a relevance function such that `relevant' reviews are those that vote correctly. At test time this learned relevance function allows us to surface reviews that are relevant to new queries on-demand. We evaluate our system, Moqa, on a novel corpus of 1.4 million questions (and answers) and 13 million reviews. We show quantitatively that it is effective at addressing both binary and open-ended queries, and qualitatively that it surfaces reviews that human evaluators consider to be relevant.Comment: WWW 2016; 14 pages, 5 figure

Revisiting Summarization Evaluation for Scientific Articles

Evaluation of text summarization approaches have been mostly based on metrics that measure similarities of system generated summaries with a set of human written gold-standard summaries. The most widely used metric in summarization evaluation has been the ROUGE family. ROUGE solely relies on lexical overlaps between the terms and phrases in the sentences; therefore, in cases of terminology variations and paraphrasing, ROUGE is not as effective. Scientific article summarization is one such case that is different from general domain summarization (e.g. newswire data). We provide an extensive analysis of ROUGE's effectiveness as an evaluation metric for scientific summarization; we show that, contrary to the common belief, ROUGE is not much reliable in evaluating scientific summaries. We furthermore show how different variants of ROUGE result in very different correlations with the manual Pyramid scores. Finally, we propose an alternative metric for summarization evaluation which is based on the content relevance between a system generated summary and the corresponding human written summaries. We call our metric SERA (Summarization Evaluation by Relevance Analysis). Unlike ROUGE, SERA consistently achieves high correlations with manual scores which shows its effectiveness in evaluation of scientific article summarization.Comment: LREC 201

Rookie: A unique approach for exploring news archives

News archives are an invaluable primary source for placing current events in historical context. But current search engine tools do a poor job at uncovering broad themes and narratives across documents. We present Rookie: a practical software system which uses natural language processing (NLP) to help readers, reporters and editors uncover broad stories in news archives. Unlike prior work, Rookie's design emerged from 18 months of iterative development in consultation with editors and computational journalists. This process lead to a dramatically different approach from previous academic systems with similar goals. Our efforts offer a generalizable case study for others building real-world journalism software using NLP.Comment: Presented at KDD 2017: Data Science + Journalism worksho

PageRank without hyperlinks: Structural re-ranking using links induced by language models

Inspired by the PageRank and HITS (hubs and authorities) algorithms for Web search, we propose a structural re-ranking approach to ad hoc information retrieval: we reorder the documents in an initially retrieved set by exploiting asymmetric relationships between them. Specifically, we consider generation links, which indicate that the language model induced from one document assigns high probability to the text of another; in doing so, we take care to prevent bias against long documents. We study a number of re-ranking criteria based on measures of centrality in the graphs formed by generation links, and show that integrating centrality into standard language-model-based retrieval is quite effective at improving precision at top ranks

BiRank: Towards Ranking on Bipartite Graphs

The bipartite graph is a ubiquitous data structure that can model the relationship between two entity types: for instance, users and items, queries and webpages. In this paper, we study the problem of ranking vertices of a bipartite graph, based on the graph's link structure as well as prior information about vertices (which we term a query vector). We present a new solution, BiRank, which iteratively assigns scores to vertices and finally converges to a unique stationary ranking. In contrast to the traditional random walk-based methods, BiRank iterates towards optimizing a regularization function, which smooths the graph under the guidance of the query vector. Importantly, we establish how BiRank relates to the Bayesian methodology, enabling the future extension in a probabilistic way. To show the rationale and extendability of the ranking methodology, we further extend it to rank for the more generic n-partite graphs. BiRank's generic modeling of both the graph structure and vertex features enables it to model various ranking hypotheses flexibly. To illustrate its functionality, we apply the BiRank and TriRank (ranking for tripartite graphs) algorithms to two real-world applications: a general ranking scenario that predicts the future popularity of items, and a personalized ranking scenario that recommends items of interest to users. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate BiRank's soundness (fast convergence), efficiency (linear in the number of graph edges) and effectiveness (achieving state-of-the-art in the two real-world tasks).Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure

Scientific Article Summarization Using Citation-Context and Article's Discourse Structure

We propose a summarization approach for scientific articles which takes advantage of citation-context and the document discourse model. While citations have been previously used in generating scientific summaries, they lack the related context from the referenced article and therefore do not accurately reflect the article's content. Our method overcomes the problem of inconsistency between the citation summary and the article's content by providing context for each citation. We also leverage the inherent scientific article's discourse for producing better summaries. We show that our proposed method effectively improves over existing summarization approaches (greater than 30% improvement over the best performing baseline) in terms of \textsc{Rouge} scores on TAC2014 scientific summarization dataset. While the dataset we use for evaluation is in the biomedical domain, most of our approaches are general and therefore adaptable to other domains.Comment: EMNLP 201

Real-Time Web Scale Event Summarization Using Sequential Decision Making

We present a system based on sequential decision making for the online summarization of massive document streams, such as those found on the web. Given an event of interest (e.g. "Boston marathon bombing"), our system is able to filter the stream for relevance and produce a series of short text updates describing the event as it unfolds over time. Unlike previous work, our approach is able to jointly model the relevance, comprehensiveness, novelty, and timeliness required by time-sensitive queries. We demonstrate a 28.3% improvement in summary F1 and a 43.8% improvement in time-sensitive F1 metrics.Comment: in Proceedings of the 25th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 201

State of the Art, Evaluation and Recommendations regarding "Document Processing and Visualization Techniques"

Several Networks of Excellence have been set up in the framework of the European FP5 research program. Among these Networks of Excellence, the NEMIS project focuses on the field of Text Mining. Within this field, document processing and visualization was identified as one of the key topics and the WG1 working group was created in the NEMIS project, to carry out a detailed survey of techniques associated with the text mining process and to identify the relevant research topics in related research areas. In this document we present the results of this comprehensive survey. The report includes a description of the current state-of-the-art and practice, a roadmap for follow-up research in the identified areas, and recommendations for anticipated technological development in the domain of text mining.Comment: 54 pages, Report of Working Group 1 for the European Network of Excellence (NoE) in Text Mining and its Applications in Statistics (NEMIS

Joint Lifelong Topic Model and Manifold Ranking for Document Summarization

Due to the manifold ranking method has a significant effect on the ranking of unknown data based on known data by using a weighted network, many researchers use the manifold ranking method to solve the document summarization task. However, their models only consider the original features but ignore the semantic features of sentences when they construct the weighted networks for the manifold ranking method. To solve this problem, we proposed two improved models based on the manifold ranking method. One is combining the topic model and manifold ranking method (JTMMR) to solve the document summarization task. This model not only uses the original feature, but also uses the semantic feature to represent the document, which can improve the accuracy of the manifold ranking method. The other one is combining the lifelong topic model and manifold ranking method (JLTMMR). On the basis of the JTMMR, this model adds the constraint of knowledge to improve the quality of the topic. At the same time, we also add the constraint of the relationship between documents to dig out a better document semantic features. The JTMMR model can improve the effect of the manifold ranking method by using the better semantic feature. Experiments show that our models can achieve a better result than other baseline models for multi-document summarization task. At the same time, our models also have a good performance on the single document summarization task. After combining with a few basic surface features, our model significantly outperforms some model based on deep learning in recent years. After that, we also do an exploring work for lifelong machine learning by analyzing the effect of adding feedback. Experiments show that the effect of adding feedback to our model is significant.Comment: 28 pages, 7 figure