Multi-Fact Correction in Abstractive Text Summarization

Yue Dong, Shuohang Wang, Zhe Gan, Yu Cheng, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Jingjing Liu


Abstract
Pre-trained neural abstractive summarization systems have dominated extractive strategies on news summarization performance, at least in terms of ROUGE. However, system-generated abstractive summaries often face the pitfall of factual inconsistency: generating incorrect facts with respect to the source text. To address this challenge, we propose Span-Fact, a suite of two factual correction models that leverages knowledge learned from question answering models to make corrections in system-generated summaries via span selection. Our models employ single or multi-masking strategies to either iteratively or auto-regressively replace entities in order to ensure semantic consistency w.r.t. the source text, while retaining the syntactic structure of summaries generated by abstractive summarization models. Experiments show that our models significantly boost the factual consistency of system-generated summaries without sacrificing summary quality in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.749
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9320–9331
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.749
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.749
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yue Dong, Shuohang Wang, Zhe Gan, Yu Cheng, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, and Jingjing Liu. 2020. Multi-Fact Correction in Abstractive Text Summarization. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 9320–9331, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-Fact Correction in Abstractive Text Summarization (Dong et al., EMNLP 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.749.pdf
Video:
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