Abstractive Document Summarization with a Graph-Based Attentional Neural Model

Jiwei Tan, Xiaojun Wan, Jianguo Xiao


Abstract
Abstractive summarization is the ultimate goal of document summarization research, but previously it is less investigated due to the immaturity of text generation techniques. Recently impressive progress has been made to abstractive sentence summarization using neural models. Unfortunately, attempts on abstractive document summarization are still in a primitive stage, and the evaluation results are worse than extractive methods on benchmark datasets. In this paper, we review the difficulties of neural abstractive document summarization, and propose a novel graph-based attention mechanism in the sequence-to-sequence framework. The intuition is to address the saliency factor of summarization, which has been overlooked by prior works. Experimental results demonstrate our model is able to achieve considerable improvement over previous neural abstractive models. The data-driven neural abstractive method is also competitive with state-of-the-art extractive methods.
Anthology ID:
P17-1108
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1171–1181
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1108
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-1108
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiwei Tan, Xiaojun Wan, and Jianguo Xiao. 2017. Abstractive Document Summarization with a Graph-Based Attentional Neural Model. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1171–1181, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Abstractive Document Summarization with a Graph-Based Attentional Neural Model (Tan et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1108.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P17-1108.mp4
Data
CNN/Daily Mail