Truth or Error? Towards systematic analysis of factual errors in abstractive summaries

Klaus-Michael Lux, Maya Sappelli, Martha Larson


Abstract
This paper presents a typology of errors produced by automatic summarization systems. The typology was created by manually analyzing the output of four recent neural summarization systems. Our work is motivated by the growing awareness of the need for better summary evaluation methods that go beyond conventional overlap-based metrics. Our typology is structured into two dimensions. First, the Mapping Dimension describes surface-level errors and provides insight into word-sequence transformation issues. Second, the Meaning Dimension describes issues related to interpretation and provides insight into breakdowns in truth, i.e., factual faithfulness to the original text. Comparative analysis revealed that two neural summarization systems leveraging pre-trained models have an advantage in decreasing grammaticality errors, but not necessarily factual errors. We also discuss the importance of ensuring that summary length and abstractiveness do not interfere with evaluating summary quality.
Anthology ID:
2020.eval4nlp-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Evaluation and Comparison of NLP Systems
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Steffen Eger, Yang Gao, Maxime Peyrard, Wei Zhao, Eduard Hovy
Venue:
Eval4NLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–10
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.eval4nlp-1.1
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.eval4nlp-1.1
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Klaus-Michael Lux, Maya Sappelli, and Martha Larson. 2020. Truth or Error? Towards systematic analysis of factual errors in abstractive summaries. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Evaluation and Comparison of NLP Systems, pages 1–10, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Truth or Error? Towards systematic analysis of factual errors in abstractive summaries (Lux et al., Eval4NLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.eval4nlp-1.1.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939711