The Power of Summary-Source Alignments

Ori Ernst, Ori Shapira, Aviv Slobodkin, Sharon Adar, Mohit Bansal, Jacob Goldberger, Ran Levy, Ido Dagan


Abstract
Multi-document summarization (MDS) is a challenging task, often decomposed to subtasks of salience and redundancy detection, followed by text generation.In this context, alignment of corresponding sentences between a reference summary and its source documents has been leveraged to generate training data for some of the component tasks. Yet, this enabling alignment step has usually been applied heuristically on the sentence level on a limited number of subtasks.In this paper, we propose extending the summary-source alignment framework by (1) applying it at the more fine-grained proposition span level, (2) annotating alignment manually in a multi-document setup, and (3) revealing the great potential of summary-source alignments to yield several datasets for at least six different tasks. Specifically, for each of the tasks, we release a manually annotated test set that was derived automatically from the alignment annotation. We also release development and train sets in the same way, but from automatically derived alignments.Using the datasets, each task is demonstrated with baseline models and corresponding evaluation metrics to spur future research on this broad challenge.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.389
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6527–6548
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.389
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.389
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ori Ernst, Ori Shapira, Aviv Slobodkin, Sharon Adar, Mohit Bansal, Jacob Goldberger, Ran Levy, and Ido Dagan. 2024. The Power of Summary-Source Alignments. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 6527–6548, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Power of Summary-Source Alignments (Ernst et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.389.pdf