Countering the Effects of Lead Bias in News Summarization via Multi-Stage Training and Auxiliary Losses

Matt Grenander, Yue Dong, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Annie Louis


Abstract
Sentence position is a strong feature for news summarization, since the lead often (but not always) summarizes the key points of the article. In this paper, we show that recent neural systems excessively exploit this trend, which although powerful for many inputs, is also detrimental when summarizing documents where important content should be extracted from later parts of the article. We propose two techniques to make systems sensitive to the importance of content in different parts of the article. The first technique employs ‘unbiased’ data; i.e., randomly shuffled sentences of the source document, to pretrain the model. The second technique uses an auxiliary ROUGE-based loss that encourages the model to distribute importance scores throughout a document by mimicking sentence-level ROUGE scores on the training data. We show that these techniques significantly improve the performance of a competitive reinforcement learning based extractive system, with the auxiliary loss being more powerful than pretraining.
Anthology ID:
D19-1620
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6019–6024
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1620
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1620
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Matt Grenander, Yue Dong, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, and Annie Louis. 2019. Countering the Effects of Lead Bias in News Summarization via Multi-Stage Training and Auxiliary Losses. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 6019–6024, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Countering the Effects of Lead Bias in News Summarization via Multi-Stage Training and Auxiliary Losses (Grenander et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1620.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1620.Attachment.zip