Abstract: Opinion summarization is the task of automatically generating summaries for a set of opinions about a specific target (e.g., a movie or a product). Since the number of input documents can be prohibitively large, neural network-based methods sacrifice end-to-end elegance and follow a two-stage approach where an extractive model first pre-selects a subset of salient opinions and an abstractive model creates the summary while conditioning on the extracted subset. However, the extractive stage leads to information loss and inflexible generation capability. In this paper we propose a summarization framework that eliminates the need to pre-select salient content. We view opinion summarization as an instance of multi-source transduction, and make use of all input documents by condensing them into multiple dense vectors which serve as input to an abstractive model. Beyond producing more informative summaries, we demonstrate that our approach allows to take user preferences into account based on a simple zero-shot customization technique. Experimental results show that our model improves the state of the art on the Rotten Tomatoes dataset by a wide margin and generates customized summaries effectively.

Introduction: The proliferation of opinions expressed in online reviews, blogs, internet forums, and social media has created a pressing need for automated systems which enable customers, companies, or service providers to make informed decisions without having to absorb large amounts of opinionated text. Opinion summarization is the task of automatically generating summaries for a set of opinions about a specific target BIBREF0. Figure FIGREF1 shows various reviews about the movie “Coach Carter” and example summaries generated by humans and automatic systems. The vast majority of previous work BIBREF1 views opinion summarization as the final stage of a three-step process involving: (1) aspect extraction (i.e., finding features pertaining to the target of interest, such as battery life or sound quality); (2) sentiment prediction (i.e., determining the sentiment of the extracted aspects); and (3) summary generation (i.e., presenting the identified opinions to the user). Textual summaries are created following mostly extractive methods which select representative segments (usually sentences) from the source text BIBREF2, BIBREF3, BIBREF4, BIBREF5. Despite being less popular, abstractive approaches seem more appropriate for the task at hand as they attempt to generate summaries which are maximally informative and minimally redundant without simply rearranging passages from the original opinions BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9. General-purpose summarization approaches have recently shown promising results with end-to-end models which are data-driven and take advantage of the success of sequence-to-sequence neural network architectures. Most approaches BIBREF10, BIBREF11, BIBREF12, BIBREF13 encode documents and then decode the learned representations into an abstractive summary, often by attending to the source input BIBREF14 and copying words from it BIBREF15. Under this modeling paradigm, it is no longer necessary to identify aspects and their sentiment for the opinion summarization task, as these are learned indirectly from training data (i.e., sets of opinions and their corresponding summaries). These models are usually tested on domains where the input is either one document or a small set of documents. However, the number of opinions tends to be very large (150 for the example in Figure FIGREF1). It is therefore practically unfeasible to train a model in an end-to-end fashion, given the memory limitations of modern hardware. As a result, current approaches BIBREF16, BIBREF17, BIBREF18, BIBREF19 sacrifice end-to-end elegance in favor of a two-stage framework which we call Extract-Abstract: an extractive model first selects a subset of opinions and an abstractive model then generates the summary while conditioning on the extracted subset (see Figure FIGREF5). The extractive pass unfortunately has two drawbacks. Firstly, on account of having access to a subset of opinions, the summaries can be less informative and inaccurate, as shown in Figure FIGREF1. And secondly, user preferences cannot be easily taken into account (e.g., the reader may wish to obtain a summary focusing on the acting or plot of a movie as opposed to a general-purpose summary) since more specialized information might have been removed. In this paper, we propose Condense-Abstract, an alternative two-stage framework which uses all input documents when generating the summary (see Figure FIGREF5). We view the opinion summarization problem as an instance of multi-source transduction BIBREF20; we first represent the input documents as multiple encodings, aiming to condense their meaning and distill information relating to sentiment and various aspects of the target being reviewed. These condensed representations are then aggregated using a multi-source fusion module based on which an opinion summary is generated using an abstractive model. We also introduce a zero-shot customization technique allowing users to control important aspects of the generated summary at test time. Our approach enables controllable generation while leveraging the full spectrum of opinions available for a specific target. We perform experiments on a dataset consisting of movie reviews and opinion summaries elicited from the Rotten Tomatoes website (BIBREF16; see Figure FIGREF1). Our framework outperforms state-of-the-art models by a large margin using automatic metrics and in a judgment elicitation study. We also verify that our zero-shot customization technique can effectively generate need-specific summaries.

Question: What is the model trained?
Answer: Condense-Abstract Framework, consisting of BiLSTM autoencoder and LSTM decoder with attention.