A Reinforced Topic-Aware Convolutional Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Abstractive Text Summarization

9 May 2018  ·  Li Wang, Junlin Yao, Yunzhe Tao, Li Zhong, Wei Liu, Qiang Du ·

In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach to tackle the automatic summarization tasks by incorporating topic information into the convolutional sequence-to-sequence (ConvS2S) model and using self-critical sequence training (SCST) for optimization. Through jointly attending to topics and word-level alignment, our approach can improve coherence, diversity, and informativeness of generated summaries via a biased probability generation mechanism. On the other hand, reinforcement training, like SCST, directly optimizes the proposed model with respect to the non-differentiable metric ROUGE, which also avoids the exposure bias during inference. We carry out the experimental evaluation with state-of-the-art methods over the Gigaword, DUC-2004, and LCSTS datasets. The empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in the abstractive summarization.

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Datasets


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Text Summarization DUC 2004 Task 1 Reinforced-Topic-ConvS2S ROUGE-1 31.15 # 6
ROUGE-2 10.85 # 5
ROUGE-L 27.68 # 5
Text Summarization GigaWord Reinforced-Topic-ConvS2S ROUGE-1 36.92 # 26
ROUGE-2 18.29 # 23
ROUGE-L 34.58 # 24

Methods