2020/10/15 by Zi-Yi Dou, Pengfei Liu, Dou, Zi-Yi +7 · 8 citations
Computer Science · #Advanced Text Analysis Techniques #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling #cs.CL
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2010.08014
NAACL 2021
openalex publication_date 2020/10/15 · arxiv created 2021/04/19 · arxiv updated 2021/04/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Neural abstractive summarization models are flexible and can produce coherent summaries, but they are sometimes unfaithful and can be difficult to control. While previous studies attempt to provide different types of guidance to control the output and increase faithfulness, it is not clear how these strategies compare and contrast to each other. In this paper, we propose a general and extensible guided summarization framework (GSum) that can effectively take different kinds of external guidance as input, and we perform experiments across several different varieties. Experiments demonstrate that this model is effective, achieving state-of-the-art performance according to ROUGE on 4 popular summarization datasets when using highlighted sentences as guidance. In addition, we show that our guided model can generate more faithful summaries and demonstrate how different types of guidance generate qualitatively different summaries, lending a degree of controllability to the learned models.