Summary-Source Proposition-level Alignment: Task, Datasets and Supervised Baseline

Ori Ernst, Ori Shapira, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Michael Lepioshkin, Jacob Goldberger, Mohit Bansal, Ido Dagan


Abstract
Aligning sentences in a reference summary with their counterparts in source documents was shown as a useful auxiliary summarization task, notably for generating training data for salience detection. Despite its assessed utility, the alignment step was mostly approached with heuristic unsupervised methods, typically ROUGE-based, and was never independently optimized or evaluated. In this paper, we propose establishing summary-source alignment as an explicit task, while introducing two major novelties: (1) applying it at the more accurate proposition span level, and (2) approaching it as a supervised classification task. To that end, we created a novel training dataset for proposition-level alignment, derived automatically from available summarization evaluation data. In addition, we crowdsourced dev and test datasets, enabling model development and proper evaluation. Utilizing these data, we present a supervised proposition alignment baseline model, showing improved alignment-quality over the unsupervised approach.
Anthology ID:
2021.conll-1.25
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Arianna Bisazza, Omri Abend
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
310–322
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.conll-1.25
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.conll-1.25
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ori Ernst, Ori Shapira, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Michael Lepioshkin, Jacob Goldberger, Mohit Bansal, and Ido Dagan. 2021. Summary-Source Proposition-level Alignment: Task, Datasets and Supervised Baseline. In Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages 310–322, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Summary-Source Proposition-level Alignment: Task, Datasets and Supervised Baseline (Ernst et al., CoNLL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.conll-1.25.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.conll-1.25.mp4
Code
 oriern/SuperPAL
Data
Multi-News