Toward Extractive Summarization of Online Forum Discussions via Hierarchical Attention Networks
This work addresses the need for concise summaries to help newcomers and participants in online forums, but it is incremental as it adapts an existing method to a new domain.
The authors tackled the problem of summarizing lengthy online forum threads by adapting hierarchical attention networks, achieving results that outperform competitive baselines.
Forum threads are lengthy and rich in content. Concise thread summaries will benefit both newcomers seeking information and those who participate in the discussion. Few studies, however, have examined the task of forum thread summarization. In this work we make the first attempt to adapt the hierarchical attention networks for thread summarization. The model draws on the recent development of neural attention mechanisms to build sentence and thread representations and use them for summarization. Our results indicate that the proposed approach can outperform a range of competitive baselines. Further, a redundancy removal step is crucial for achieving outstanding results.