Data Augmentation for Abstractive Query-Focused Multi-Document Summarization

The progress in Query-focused Multi-Document Summarization (QMDS) has been limited by the lack of sufficient largescale high-quality training datasets. We present two QMDS training datasets, which we construct using two data augmentation methods: (1) transferring the commonly used single-document CNN/Daily Mail summarization dataset to create the QMDSCNN dataset, and (2) mining search-query logs to create the QMDSIR dataset. These two datasets have complementary properties, i.e., QMDSCNN has real summaries but queries are simulated, while QMDSIR has real queries but simulated summaries. To cover both these real summary and query aspects, we build abstractive end-to-end neural network models on the combined datasets that yield new state-of-the-art transfer results on DUC datasets. We also introduce new hierarchical encoders that enable a more efficient encoding of the query together with multiple documents. Empirical results demonstrate that our data augmentation and encoding methods outperform baseline models on automatic metrics, as well as on human evaluations along multiple attributes.Comment: AAAI 2021 (13 pages

Pretrained Transformers for Text Ranking: BERT and Beyond

The goal of text ranking is to generate an ordered list of texts retrieved from a corpus in response to a query. Although the most common formulation of text ranking is search, instances of the task can also be found in many natural language processing applications. This survey provides an overview of text ranking with neural network architectures known as transformers, of which BERT is the best-known example. The combination of transformers and self-supervised pretraining has been responsible for a paradigm shift in natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval (IR), and beyond. In this survey, we provide a synthesis of existing work as a single point of entry for practitioners who wish to gain a better understanding of how to apply transformers to text ranking problems and researchers who wish to pursue work in this area. We cover a wide range of modern techniques, grouped into two high-level categories: transformer models that perform reranking in multi-stage architectures and dense retrieval techniques that perform ranking directly. There are two themes that pervade our survey: techniques for handling long documents, beyond typical sentence-by-sentence processing in NLP, and techniques for addressing the tradeoff between effectiveness (i.e., result quality) and efficiency (e.g., query latency, model and index size). Although transformer architectures and pretraining techniques are recent innovations, many aspects of how they are applied to text ranking are relatively well understood and represent mature techniques. However, there remain many open research questions, and thus in addition to laying out the foundations of pretrained transformers for text ranking, this survey also attempts to prognosticate where the field is heading

Query focused abstractive summarization using BERTSUM model

In Natural Language Processing, researchers find many challenges on Query Focused Abstractive Summarization (QFAS), where Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers for Summarization (BERTSUM) can be used for both extractive and abstractive summarization. As there is few available datasets for QFAS, we have generated queries for two publicly available datasets, CNN/Daily Mail and Newsroom, according to the context of the documents and summaries. To generate abstractive summaries, we have applied two different approaches, which are Query focused Abstractive and Query focused Extractive then Abstractive summarizations. In the first approach, we have sorted the sentences of the documents from the most query-related sentences to the less query-related sentences, and in the second approach, we have extracted only the query related sentences to fine-tune the BERTSUM model. Our experimental results show that both of our approaches show good results on ROUGE metric for CNN/Daily Mail and Newsroom datasets

Big Brother: A Drop-In Website Interaction Logging Service

Fine-grained logging of interactions in user studies is important for studying user behaviour, among other reasons. However, in many research scenarios, the way interactions are logged are usually tied to a monolithic system. We present a generic, application independent service for logging interactions in web-pages, specifically targeting user studies. Our service, Big Brother, can be dropped-in to existing user interfaces with almost no configuration required by researchers. Big Brother has already been used in several user studies to record interactions in a number of user study research scenarios, such as lab-based and crowdsourcing environments. We further demonstrate the ability for Big Brother to scale to very large user studies through benchmarking experiments. Big Brother also provides a number of additional tools for visualising and analysing interactions. Big Brother significantly lowers the barrier to entry for logging user interactions by providing a minimal but powerful, no configuration necessary, service for researchers and practitioners of user studies that can scale to thousands of concurrent sessions. We have made the source code and releases for Big Brother available for download at https://github.com/hscells/bigbro

Geographic information extraction from texts

A large volume of unstructured texts, containing valuable geographic information, is available online. This information – provided implicitly or explicitly – is useful not only for scientific studies (e.g., spatial humanities) but also for many practical applications (e.g., geographic information retrieval). Although large progress has been achieved in geographic information extraction from texts, there are still unsolved challenges and issues, ranging from methods, systems, and data, to applications and privacy. Therefore, this workshop will provide a timely opportunity to discuss the recent advances, new ideas, and concepts but also identify research gaps in geographic information extraction