Title
FusionSum: Abstractive summarization with sentence fusion and cooperative reinforcement learning
Abstract
When summarizing an article, humans are habituated to fuse multiple related sentences to make the summary more concise and coherent. But most of the previous work focuses on the grammaticality of the fusion process and neglects the mechanism behind which sentences should be fused together. And there also lacks an effective training method for bridging the modules in the model to approach a global optimization. In this paper we propose FusionSum, a novel framework that imitates the behaviors of humans in summarization by explicitly modeling the sentence grouping and fusion process. It consists of an entity-aware sentence grouping module to identify salient sentences and combine them into groups, after which a unified sentence fusion module rewrites each group into a summary sentence. Furthermore, we also study the collaboration problem between these two modules and propose cooperative reinforcement learning method, which plays a maximax two-player game to approach global optimization. Automatic evaluation shows that our model significantly outperforms the strong baselines on three prevalent corpora. Human evaluation further demonstrates the summaries generated by our model are more concise and coherent.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1016/j.knosys.2022.108483
Knowledge-Based Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Text summarization,Reinforcement learning,Sentence fusion,BERT
Journal
243
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0950-7051
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Liqiang Xiao1135.60
Hao He299.34
Yaohui Jin314329.65