Topic-Aware Encoding for Extractive Summarization
This work improves extractive summarization for long documents by ensuring summaries focus on central topics, which is incremental as it builds on existing neural methods.
The paper tackles the problem of extractive summarization by addressing the lack of central topic consideration in existing models, proposing a topic-aware encoding method that combines syntactic and topic-level information, and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets.
Document summarization provides an instrument for faster understanding the collection of text documents and has several real-life applications. With the growth of online text data, numerous summarization models have been proposed recently. The Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) based neural summarization model is the most widely used in the summarization field due to its high performance. This is because semantic information and structure information in the text is adequately considered when encoding. However, the existing extractive summarization models pay little attention to and use the central topic information to assist the generation of summaries, which leads to models not ensuring the generated summary under the primary topic. A lengthy document can span several topics, and a single summary cannot do justice to all the topics. Therefore, the key to generating a high-quality summary is determining the central topic and building a summary based on it, especially for a long document. We propose a topic-aware encoding for document summarization to deal with this issue. This model effectively combines syntactic-level and topic-level information to build a comprehensive sentence representation. Specifically, a neural topic model is added in the neural-based sentence-level representation learning to adequately consider the central topic information for capturing the critical content in the original document. The experimental results on three public datasets show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models.