A Reinforced Topic-Aware Convolutional Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Abstractive Text Summarization

In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach to tackle the automatic summarization tasks by incorporating topic information into the convolutional sequence-to-sequence (ConvS2S) model and using self-critical sequence training (SCST) for optimization. Through jointly attending to topics and word-level alignment, our approach can improve coherence, diversity, and informativeness of generated summaries via a biased probability generation mechanism. On the other hand, reinforcement training, like SCST, directly optimizes the proposed model with respect to the non-differentiable metric ROUGE, which also avoids the exposure bias during inference. We carry out the experimental evaluation with state-of-the-art methods over the Gigaword, DUC-2004, and LCSTS datasets. The empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in the abstractive summarization.

Authors

• Li Wang
• Junlin Yao
• Yunzhe Tao
• Li Zhong University of California, San Diego
• Wei Liu Amazon AGI
• Qiang Du

Keywords

• Machine Learning Applications: Applications of Reinforcement Learning
• Machine Learning: Deep Learning
• Machine Learning: Neural Networks
• Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Summarization