Controllable Neural Dialogue Summarization with Personal Named Entity Planning

Zhengyuan Liu, Nancy Chen


Abstract
In this paper, we propose a controllable neural generation framework that can flexibly guide dialogue summarization with personal named entity planning. The conditional sequences are modulated to decide what types of information or what perspective to focus on when forming summaries to tackle the under-constrained problem in summarization tasks. This framework supports two types of use cases: (1) Comprehensive Perspective, which is a general-purpose case with no user-preference specified, considering summary points from all conversational interlocutors and all mentioned persons; (2) Focus Perspective, positioning the summary based on a user-specified personal named entity, which could be one of the interlocutors or one of the persons mentioned in the conversation. During training, we exploit occurrence planning of personal named entities and coreference information to improve temporal coherence and to minimize hallucination in neural generation. Experimental results show that our proposed framework generates fluent and factually consistent summaries under various planning controls using both objective metrics and human evaluations.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
92–106
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.8
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhengyuan Liu and Nancy Chen. 2021. Controllable Neural Dialogue Summarization with Personal Named Entity Planning. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 92–106, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Controllable Neural Dialogue Summarization with Personal Named Entity Planning (Liu & Chen, EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.8.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.8.mp4
Code
 seq-to-mind/planning_dial_summ