Friendly Topic Assistant for Transformer Based Abstractive Summarization

Zhengjue Wang, Zhibin Duan, Hao Zhang, Chaojie Wang, Long Tian, Bo Chen, Mingyuan Zhou


Abstract
Abstractive document summarization is a comprehensive task including document understanding and summary generation, in which area Transformer-based models have achieved the state-of-the-art performance. Compared with Transformers, topic models are better at learning explicit document semantics, and hence could be integrated into Transformers to further boost their performance. To this end, we rearrange and explore the semantics learned by a topic model, and then propose a topic assistant (TA) including three modules. TA is compatible with various Transformer-based models and user-friendly since i) TA is a plug-and-play model that does not break any structure of the original Transformer network, making users easily fine-tune Transformer+TA based on a well pre-trained model; ii) TA only introduces a small number of extra parameters. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that TA is able to improve the performance of several Transformer-based models.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.35
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
485–497
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.35
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.35
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhengjue Wang, Zhibin Duan, Hao Zhang, Chaojie Wang, Long Tian, Bo Chen, and Mingyuan Zhou. 2020. Friendly Topic Assistant for Transformer Based Abstractive Summarization. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 485–497, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Friendly Topic Assistant for Transformer Based Abstractive Summarization (Wang et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.35.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939270