Feiyang Pan


2019

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Reading Like HER: Human Reading Inspired Extractive Summarization
Ling Luo | Xiang Ao | Yan Song | Feiyang Pan | Min Yang | Qing He
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

In this work, we re-examine the problem of extractive text summarization for long documents. We observe that the process of extracting summarization of human can be divided into two stages: 1) a rough reading stage to look for sketched information, and 2) a subsequent careful reading stage to select key sentences to form the summary. By simulating such a two-stage process, we propose a novel approach for extractive summarization. We formulate the problem as a contextual-bandit problem and solve it with policy gradient. We adopt a convolutional neural network to encode gist of paragraphs for rough reading, and a decision making policy with an adapted termination mechanism for careful reading. Experiments on the CNN and DailyMail datasets show that our proposed method can provide high-quality summaries with varied length, and significantly outperform the state-of-the-art extractive methods in terms of ROUGE metrics.