Focus Attention: Promoting Faithfulness and Diversity in Summarization

Rahul Aralikatte, Shashi Narayan, Joshua Maynez, Sascha Rothe, Ryan McDonald


Abstract
Professional summaries are written with document-level information, such as the theme of the document, in mind. This is in contrast with most seq2seq decoders which simultaneously learn to focus on salient content, while deciding what to generate, at each decoding step. With the motivation to narrow this gap, we introduce Focus Attention Mechanism, a simple yet effective method to encourage decoders to proactively generate tokens that are similar or topical to the input document. Further, we propose a Focus Sampling method to enable generation of diverse summaries, an area currently understudied in summarization. When evaluated on the BBC extreme summarization task, two state-of-the-art models augmented with Focus Attention generate summaries that are closer to the target and more faithful to their input documents, outperforming their vanilla counterparts on ROUGE and multiple faithfulness measures. We also empirically demonstrate that Focus Sampling is more effective in generating diverse and faithful summaries than top-k or nucleus sampling-based decoding methods.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.474
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6078–6095
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.474
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.474
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rahul Aralikatte, Shashi Narayan, Joshua Maynez, Sascha Rothe, and Ryan McDonald. 2021. Focus Attention: Promoting Faithfulness and Diversity in Summarization. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6078–6095, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Focus Attention: Promoting Faithfulness and Diversity in Summarization (Aralikatte et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.474.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.474.mp4