Fact-based Content Weighting for Evaluating Abstractive Summarisation

Xinnuo Xu, Ondřej Dušek, Jingyi Li, Verena Rieser, Ioannis Konstas


Abstract
Abstractive summarisation is notoriously hard to evaluate since standard word-overlap-based metrics are insufficient. We introduce a new evaluation metric which is based on fact-level content weighting, i.e. relating the facts of the document to the facts of the summary. We fol- low the assumption that a good summary will reflect all relevant facts, i.e. the ones present in the ground truth (human-generated refer- ence summary). We confirm this hypothe- sis by showing that our weightings are highly correlated to human perception and compare favourably to the recent manual highlight- based metric of Hardy et al. (2019).
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.455
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5071–5081
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.455
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.455
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinnuo Xu, Ondřej Dušek, Jingyi Li, Verena Rieser, and Ioannis Konstas. 2020. Fact-based Content Weighting for Evaluating Abstractive Summarisation. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5071–5081, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Fact-based Content Weighting for Evaluating Abstractive Summarisation (Xu et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.455.pdf
Video:
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