Title
Outline Generation: Understanding the Inherent Content Structure of Documents.
Abstract
In this paper, we introduce and tackle the Outline Generation (OG) task, which aims to unveil the inherent content structure of a multi-paragraph document by identifying its potential sections and generating the corresponding section headings. Without loss of generality, the OG task can be viewed as a novel structured summarization task. To generate a sound outline, an ideal OG model should be able to capture three levels of coherence, namely the coherence between context paragraphs, that between a section and its heading, and that between context headings. The first one is the foundation for section identification, while the latter two are critical for consistent heading generation. In this work, we formulate the OG task as a hierarchical structured prediction problem, i.e., to first predict a sequence of section boundaries and then a sequence of section headings accordingly. We propose a novel hierarchical structured neural generation model, named HiStGen, for the task. Our model attempts to capture the three-level coherence via the following ways. First, we introduce a Markov paragraph dependency mechanism between context paragraphs for section identification. Second, we employ a section-aware attention mechanism to ensure the semantic coherence between a section and its heading. Finally, we leverage a Markov heading dependency mechanism and a review mechanism between context headings to improve the consistency and eliminate duplication between section headings. Besides, we build a novel Wriptsize IKI OG dataset, a public collection which consists of over 1.75 million document-outline pairs for research on the OG task. Experimental results on our benchmark dataset demonstrate that our model can significantly outperform several state-of-the-art sequential generation models for the OG task.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3331184.3331208
Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
Keywords
Field
DocType
coherence, hierarchical structured prediction, outline generation
Automatic summarization,Computer science,Structured prediction,Markov chain,Coherence (physics),Paragraph,Without loss of generality,Artificial intelligence,Natural language processing
Journal
Volume
ISBN
Citations 
abs/1905.10039
978-1-4503-6172-9
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ruqing Zhang11510.40
Jiafeng Guo21737102.17
Yixing Fan320219.39
Yanyan Lan4100563.59
Xueqi Cheng53148247.04