pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Summarizing Dialogues with Negative Cues
Authors: Junpeng Liu, Yanyan Zou, Yuxuan Xi, Shengjie Li, Mian Ma, Zhuoye Ding
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Abstractive Dialogue Summarization, Articles

Abstractive dialogue summarization aims to convert a long dialogue content into its short form where the salient information is preserved while the redundant pieces are ignored. Different from the well-structured text, such as news and scientific articles, dialogues often consist of utterances coming from two or more interlocutors, where the conversations are often informal, verbose, and repetitive, sprinkled with false-starts, backchanneling, reconfirmations, hesitations, speaker interruptions and the salient information is often scattered across the whole chat. The above properties of conversations make it difficult to directly concentrate on scattered outstanding utterances and thus present new challenges of summarizing dialogues. In this work, rather than directly forcing a summarization system to merely pay more attention to the salient pieces, we propose to explicitly have the model perceive the redundant parts of an input dialogue history during the training phase. To be specific, we design two strategies to construct examples without salient pieces as negative cues. Then, the sequence-to-sequence likelihood loss is cooperated with the unlikelihood objective to drive the model to focus less on the unimportant information and also pay more attention to the salient pieces. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate that our simple method significantly outperforms the baselines with regard to both semantic matching and factual consistent based metrics. The human evaluation also proves the performance gains.
View Dialogue in 2D: A Two-stream Model in Time-speaker Perspective for Dialogue Summarization and beyond
Authors: Keli Xie, Dongchen He, Jiaxin Zhuang, Siyuan Lu, Zhongfeng Wang
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Document Summarization, Machine Reading Comprehension, Reading Comprehension

Existing works on dialogue summarization often follow the common practice in document summarization and view the dialogue, which comprises utterances of different speakers, as a single utterance stream ordered by time. However, this single-stream approach without specific attention to the speaker-centered points has limitations in fully understanding the dialogue. To better capture the dialogue information, we propose a 2D view of dialogue based on a time-speaker perspective, where the time and speaker streams of dialogue can be obtained as strengthened input. Based on this 2D view, we present an effective two-stream model called ATM to combine the two streams. Extensive experiments on various summarization datasets demonstrate that ATM significantly surpasses other models regarding diverse metrics and beats the state-of-the-art models on the QMSum dataset in ROUGE scores. Besides, ATM achieves great improvements in summary faithfulness and human evaluation. Moreover, results on machine reading comprehension datasets show the generalization ability of the proposed methods and shed light on other dialogue-based tasks. Our code will be publicly available online.
Meta-CQG: A Meta-Learning Framework for Complex Question Generation over Knowledge Bases
Authors: Kun Zhang, Yunqi Qiu, Yuanzhuo Wang, Long Bai, Wei Li, Xuhui Jiang, HuaWei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Decoder, Meta-Learning, Question Generation, Question-Generation

Complex question generation over knowledge bases (KB) aims to generate natural language questions involving multiple KB relations or functional constraints. Existing methods train one encoder-decoder-based model to fit all questions. However, such a one-size-fits-all strategy may not perform well since complex questions exhibit an uneven distribution in many dimensions, such as question types, involved KB relations, and query structures, resulting in insufficient learning for long-tailed samples under different dimensions. To address this problem, we propose a meta-learning framework for complex question generation. The meta-trained generator can acquire universal and transferable meta-knowledge and quickly adapt to long-tailed samples through a few most related training samples. To retrieve similar samples for each input query, we design a self-supervised graph retriever to learn distributed representations for samples, and contrastive learning is leveraged to improve the learned representations. We conduct experiments on both WebQuestionsSP and ComplexWebQuestion, and results on long-tailed samples of different dimensions have been significantly improved, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Multi-Perspective Document Revision
Authors: Mana Ihori, Hiroshi Sato, Tomohiro Tanaka, Ryo Masumura
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Grammatical Error Correction, Relation Classification, Sentence

This paper presents a novel multi-perspective document revision task. In conventional studies on document revision, tasks such as grammatical error correction, sentence reordering, and discourse relation classification have been performed individually; however, these tasks simultaneously should be revised to improve the readability and clarity of a whole document. Thus, our study defines multi-perspective document revision as a task that simultaneously revises multiple perspectives. To model the task, we design a novel Japanese multi-perspective document revision dataset that simultaneously handles seven perspectives to improve the readability and clarity of a document. Although a large amount of data that simultaneously handles multiple perspectives is needed to model multi-perspective document revision elaborately, it is difficult to prepare such a large amount of this data. Therefore, our study offers a multi-perspective document revision modeling method that can use a limited amount of matched data (i.e., data for the multi-perspective document revision task) and external partially-matched data (e.g., data for the grammatical error correction task). Experiments using our created dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of using multiple partially-matched datasets to model the multi-perspective document revision task.
A Survey of Automatic Text Summarization Using Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Marco Ferdinand Salchner, Adam Jatowt
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Survey, Text Summarization

Although automatic text summarization (ATS) has been researched for several decades, the application of graph neural networks (GNNs) to this task started relatively recently. In this survey we provide an overview on the rapidly evolving approach of using GNNs for the task of automatic text summarization. In particular we provide detailed information on the functionality of GNNs in the context of ATS, and a comprehensive overview of models utilizing this approach.
Phrase-Level Localization of Inconsistency Errors in Summarization by Weak Supervision
Authors: Masato Takatsuka, Tetsunori Kobayashi, Yoshihiko Hayashi
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: ARC, Sentence, Sentence Fusion

Although the fluency of automatically generated abstractive summaries has improved significantly with advanced methods, the inconsistency that remains in summarization is recognized as an issue to be addressed. In this study, we propose a methodology for localizing inconsistency errors in summarization. A synthetic dataset that contains a variety of factual errors likely to be produced by a common summarizer is created by applying sentence fusion, compression, and paraphrasing operations. In creating the dataset, we automatically label erroneous phrases and the dependency relations between them as “inconsistent,” which can contribute to detecting errors more adequately than existing models that rely only on dependency arc-level labels. Subsequently, this synthetic dataset is employed as weak supervision to train a model called SumPhrase, which jointly localizes errors in a summary and their corresponding sentences in the source document. The empirical results demonstrate that our SumPhrase model can detect factual errors in summarization more effectively than existing weakly supervised methods owing to the phrase-level labeling. Moreover, the joint identification of error-corresponding original sentences is proven to be effective in improving error detection accuracy.
PoliSe: Reinforcing Politeness Using User Sentiment for Customer Care Response Generation
Authors: Mauajama Firdaus, Asif Ekbal, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Decoder, Response Generation, Sentiment Analysis

The interaction between a consumer and the customer service representative greatly contributes to the overall customer experience. Therefore, to ensure customers’ comfort and retention, it is important that customer service agents and chatbots connect with users on social, cordial, and empathetic planes. In the current work, we automatically identify the sentiment of the user and transform the neutral responses into polite responses conforming to the sentiment and the conversational history. Our technique is basically a reinforced multi-task network- the primary task being ‘polite response generation’ and the secondary task being ‘sentiment analysis’- that uses a Transformer based encoder-decoder. We use sentiment annotated conversations from Twitter as the training data. The detailed evaluation shows that our proposed approach attains superior performance compared to the baseline models.
Focus-Driven Contrastive Learning for Medical Question Summarization
Authors: Ming Zhang, Shuai Dou, Ziyang Wang, Yunfang Wu
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Decoder, Sentence

Automatic medical question summarization can significantly help the system to understand consumer health questions and retrieve correct answers. The Seq2Seq model based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) has been applied in this task, which faces two general problems: the model can not capture well question focus and and the traditional MLE strategy lacks the ability to understand sentence-level semantics. To alleviate these problems, we propose a novel question focus-driven contrastive learning framework (QFCL). Specially, we propose an easy and effective approach to generate hard negative samples based on the question focus, and exploit contrastive learning at both encoder and decoder to obtain better sentence level representations. On three medical benchmark datasets, our proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art results, and obtains a performance gain of 5.33, 12.85 and 3.81 points over the baseline BART model on three datasets respectively. Further human judgement and detailed analysis prove that our QFCL model learns better sentence representations with the ability to distinguish different sentence meanings, and generates high-quality summaries by capturing question focus.
Semantic Overlap Summarization among Multiple Alternative Narratives: An Exploratory Study
Authors: Naman Bansal, Mousumi Akter, Shubhra Kanti Karmaker
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Sentence, Text Summarization

In this paper, we introduce an important yet relatively unexplored NLP task called Semantic Overlap Summarization (SOS), which entails generating a single summary from multiple alternative narratives which can convey the common information provided by those narratives. As no benchmark dataset is readily available for this task, we created one by collecting 2,925 alternative narrative pairs from the web and then, went through the tedious process of manually creating 411 different reference summaries by engaging human annotators. As a way to evaluate this novel task, we first conducted a systematic study by borrowing the popular ROUGE metric from text-summarization literature and discovered that ROUGE is not suitable for our task. Subsequently, we conducted further human annotations to create 200 document-level and 1,518 sentence-level ground-truth overlap labels. Our experiments show that the sentence-wise annotation technique with three overlap labels, i.e., Absent (A), Partially-Present (PP), and Present (P), yields a higher correlation with human judgment and higher inter-rater agreement compared to the ROUGE metric.
Analyzing the Dialect Diversity in Multi-document Summaries
Authors: Olubusayo Olabisi, Aaron Hudson, Antonie Jetter, Ameeta Agrawal
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Diversity, Text Summarization

Social media posts provide a compelling, yet challenging source of data of diverse perspectives from many socially salient groups. Automatic text summarization algorithms make this data accessible at scale by compressing large collections of documents into short summaries that preserve salient information from the source text. In this work, we take a complementary approach to analyzing and improving the quality of summaries generated from social media data in terms of their ability to represent salient as well as diverse perspectives. We introduce a novel dataset, DivSumm, of dialect diverse tweets and human-written extractive and abstractive summaries. Then, we study the extent of dialect diversity reflected in human-written reference summaries as well as system-generated summaries. The results of our extensive experiments suggest that humans annotate fairly well-balanced dialect diverse summaries, and that cluster-based pre-processing approaches seem beneficial in improving the overall quality of the system-generated summaries without loss in diversity.
Generation of Patient After-Visit Summaries to Support Physicians
Authors: Pengshan Cai, Fei Liu, Adarsha Bajracharya, Joe Sills, Alok Kapoor, Weisong Liu, Dan Berlowitz, David Levy, Richeek Pradhan, Hong Yu
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Management

An after-visit summary (AVS) is a summary note given to patients after their clinical visit. It recaps what happened during their clinical visit and guides patients’ disease self-management. Studies have shown that a majority of patients found after-visit summaries useful. However, many physicians face excessive workloads and do not have time to write clear and informative summaries. In this paper, we study the problem of automatic generation of after-visit summaries and examine whether those summaries can convey the gist of clinical visits. We report our findings on a new clinical dataset that contains a large number of electronic health record (EHR) notes and their associated summaries. Our results suggest that generation of lay language after-visit summaries remains a challenging task. Crucially, we introduce a feedback mechanism that alerts physicians when an automatic summary fails to capture the important details of the clinical notes or when it contains hallucinated facts that are potentially detrimental to the summary quality. Automatic and human evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in providing writing feedback and supporting physicians.
HeterGraphLongSum: Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network with Passage Aggregation for Extractive Long Document Summarization
Authors: Tuan-Anh Phan, Ngoc-Dung Ngoc Nguyen, Khac-Hoai Nam Bui
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Document Summarization, Extractive Document Summarization, Graph Neural Network, Sentence

Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based models have proven effective in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks in recent years. Specifically, in the case of the Extractive Document Summarization (EDS) task, modeling documents under graph structure is able to analyze the complex relations between semantic units (e.g., word-to-word, word-to-sentence, sentence-to-sentence) and enrich sentence representations via valuable information from their neighbors. However, long-form document summarization using graph-based methods is still an open research issue. The main challenge is to represent long documents in a graph structure in an effective way. In this regard, this paper proposes a new heterogeneous graph neural network (HeterGNN) model to improve the performance of long document summarization (HeterGraphLongSum). Specifically, the main idea is to add the passage nodes into the heterogeneous graph structure of word and sentence nodes for enriching the final representation of sentences. In this regard, HeterGraphLongSum is designed with three types of semantic units such as word, sentence, and passage. Experiments on two benchmark datasets for long documents such as Pubmed and Arxiv indicate promising results of the proposed model for the extractive long document summarization problem. Especially, HeterGraphLongSum is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance without relying on any pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT). The source code is available for further exploitation on the Github.
Type-dependent Prompt CycleQAG : Cycle Consistency for Multi-hop Question Generation
Authors: Seungyeon Lee, Minho Lee
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Answer Generation, Logical Reasoning, Question-Answer-Generation, Question Answering, Question Generation, Question-Generation, Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

Multi-hop question generation (QG) is the process of generating answer related questions, which requires aggregating multiple pieces of information and reasoning from different parts of the texts. This is opposed to single-hop QG which generates questions from sentences containing an answer in a given paragraph. Single-hop QG requires no reasoning or complexity, while multi-hop QG often requires logical reasoning to derive an answer related question, making it a dual task. Not enough research has been made on the multi-hop QG due to its complexity. Also, a question should be created using the question type and words related to the correct answer as a prompt so that multi-hop questions can get more information. In this view, we propose a new type-dependent prompt cycleQAG (cyclic question-answer-generation), with a cycle consistency loss in which QG and Question Answering (QA) are learnt in a cyclic manner. The novelty is that the cycle consistency loss uses the negative cross entropy to generate syntactically diverse questions that enable selecting different word representations. Empirical evaluation on the multi-hop dataset with automatic and human evaluation metrics outperforms the baseline model by about 10.38% based on ROUGE score.
UPER: Boosting Multi-Document Summarization with an Unsupervised Prompt-based Extractor
Authors: Shangqing Tu, Jifan Yu, Fangwei Zhu, Juanzi Li, Lei Hou, Jian-Yun Nie
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Abstract generation, Document Summarization, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Multi-Document Summarization

Multi-Document Summarization (MDS) commonly employs the 2-stage extract-then-abstract paradigm, which first extracts a relatively short meta-document, then feeds it into the deep neural networks to generate an abstract. Previous work usually takes the ROUGE score as the label for training a scoring model to evaluate source documents. However, the trained scoring model is prone to under-fitting for low-resource settings, as it relies on the training data. To extract documents effectively, we construct prompting templates that invoke the underlying knowledge in Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) to calculate the document and keyword’s perplexity, which can assess the document’s semantic salience. Our unsupervised approach can be applied as a plug-in to boost other metrics for evaluating a document’s salience, thus improving the subsequent abstract generation. We get positive results on 2 MDS datasets, 2 data settings, and 2 abstractive backbone models, showing our method’s effectiveness. Our code is available at https://github.com/THU-KEG/UPER
CoCGAN: Contrastive Learning for Adversarial Category Text Generation
Authors: Xin Sheng, Linli Xu, Yinlong Xu, Changcun Bao, Huang Chen, Bo Ren
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Text Generation

The task of generating texts of different categories has attracted more and more attention in the area of natural language generation recently. Meanwhile, generative adversarial net (GAN) has demonstrated its effectiveness on text generation, and is further applied to category text generation in later works. Different from existing methods, which mainly consider the pairwise relations between the text embedding and the corresponding fixed one-hot class label (data-to-class relations), this paper proposes a novel Contrastive Category Generative Adversarial Net (CoCGAN) to incorporate contrastive learning into adversarial category text generation, considering more flexible data-to-class relations as well as relations between the multiple text embeddings in the same batch (data-to-data relations). The discriminator of CoCGAN discriminates the authenticity of given samples and optimizes a contrastive learning objective to capture both more flexible data-to-class relations and data-to-data relations among training samples. Accordingly, the generator tries to produce more realistic samples which can confuse the discriminator. Experimental results on both synthetic and real category text generation datasets demonstrate that CoCGAN can achieve significant improvements over the baseline category text generation models.
Chinese Couplet Generation with Syntactic Information
Authors: Yan Song
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: POS

Chinese couplet generation aims to generate a pair of clauses (usually generating a subsequent clause given an antecedent one) with certain rules (e.g., morphological and syntactical symmetry) adhered and has long been a challenging task with cultural background. To generate high-quality couplet (antecedent) clauses, it normally requires a model to learn the correspondences between antecedent and subsequent clauses under aforementioned rules and constraint of few characters with their concise usage. To tackle this task, previous studies normally directly adopt deep neural networks without explicitly taking into account fine-grained analysis of the clauses, in this paper, we propose to enhance Chinese couplet generation by leveraging syntactic information, i.e., part-of-speech (POS) tags and word dependencies. In doing so, we identify word boundaries in the antecedent clause and then use a special attention module to encode the syntactic information over the words for better generating the subsequent clause. Experimental results on a dataset for Chinese couplet generation illustrate the validity and effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms strong baselines with respect to automatic and manual evaluation metrics.