Surfer100: Generating Surveys From Web Resources, Wikipedia-style

LREC 2022 · Irene Li, Alexander Fabbri, Rina Kawamura, Yixin Liu, Xiangru Tang, Jaesung Tae, Chang Shen, Sally Ma, Tomoe Mizutani, Dragomir Radev ·

Fast-developing fields such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) often outpace the efforts of encyclopedic sources such as Wikipedia, which either do not completely cover recently-introduced topics or lack such content entirely. As a result, methods for automatically producing content are valuable tools to address this information overload. We show that recent advances in pretrained language modeling can be combined for a two-stage extractive and abstractive approach for Wikipedia lead paragraph generation. We extend this approach to generate longer Wikipedia-style summaries with sections and examine how such methods struggle in this application through detailed studies with 100 reference human-collected surveys. This is the first study on utilizing web resources for long Wikipedia-style summaries to the best of our knowledge.