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1. SUMDocS: Surrounding-aware Unsupervised Multi-Document Summarization

   https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611976700.54  

   Qi Zhu, Fang Guo (April 2021, Proceedings of the 2021 {SIAM} International Conference on Data Mining, {SDM} 2021)

   Carlotta Demeniconi, Ian Davidson: (Ed.)

   Multi-document summarization, which summarizes a set of documents with a small number of phrases or sentences, provides a concise and critical essence of the documents. Existing multi-document summarization methods ignore the fact that there often exist many relevant documents that provide surrounding background knowledge, which can help generate a salient and discriminative summary for a given set of documents. In this paper, we propose a novel method, SUMDocS (Surrounding-aware Unsupervised Multi-Document Summarization), which incorporates rich surrounding (topically related) documents to help improve the quality of extractive summarization without human supervision. Speci fically, we propose a joint optimization algorithm to unify global novelty (i.e., category-level frequent and discriminative), local consistency (i.e., locally frequent, co-occurring), and local saliency (i.e., salient from its surroundings) such that the obtained summary captures the characteristics of the target documents. Extensive experiments on news and scientifi c domains demonstrate the superior performance of our method when the unlabeled surrounding corpus is utilized. 

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2. Segmented Summarization and Refinement: A Pipeline for Long-Document Analysis on Social Media

   https://doi.org/10.23919/JSC.2024.0010  

   Wang, Guanghua; Garg, Priyanshi; Wu, Weili (June 2024, Journal of Social Computing)

   Social media9s explosive growth has resulted in a massive influx of electronic documents influencing various facets of daily life. However, the enormous and complex nature of this content makes extracting valuable insights challenging. Long document summarization emerges as a pivotal technique in this context, serving to distill extensive texts into concise and comprehensible summaries. This paper presents a novel three-stage pipeline for effective long document summarization. The proposed approach combines unsupervised and supervised learning techniques, efficiently handling large document sets while requiring minimal computational resources. Our methodology introduces a unique process for forming semantic chunks through spectral dynamic segmentation, effectively reducing redundancy and repetitiveness in the summarization process. Contrary to previous methods, our approach aligns each semantic chunk with the entire summary paragraph, allowing the abstractive summarization model to process documents without truncation and enabling the summarization model to deduce missing information from other chunks. To enhance the summary generation, we utilize a sophisticated rewrite model based on Bidirectional and Auto- Regressive Transformers (BART), rearranging and reformulating summary constructs to improve their fluidity and coherence. Empirical studies conducted on the long documents from the Webis-TLDR-17 dataset demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the efficiency of abstractive summarization transformers. The contributions of this paper thus offer significant advancements in the field of long document summarization, providing a novel and effective methodology for summarizing extensive texts in the context of social media. 

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3. Summarization assessment methodology for multiple corpora using queries and classification for functional evaluation

   https://doi.org/10.3233/ICA-220680  

   Wolyn, Sam; Simske, Steven J. (June 2022, Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering)

   Extractive summarization is an important natural language processing approach used for document compression, improved reading comprehension, key phrase extraction, indexing, query set generation, and other analytics approaches. Extractive summarization has specific advantages over abstractive summarization in that it preserves style, specific text elements, and compound phrases that might be more directly associated with the text. In this article, the relative effectiveness of extractive summarization is considered on two widely different corpora: (1) a set of works of fiction (100 total, mainly novels) available from Project Gutenberg, and (2) a large set of news articles (3000) for which a ground truthed summarization (gold standard) is provided by the authors of the news articles. Both sets were evaluated using 5 different Python Sumy algorithms and compared to randomly-generated summarizations quantitatively. Two functional approaches to assessing the efficacy of summarization using a query set on both the original documents and their summaries, and using document classification on a 12-class set to compare among different summarization approaches, are introduced. The results, unsurprisingly, show considerable differences consistent with the different nature of these two data sets. The LSA and Luhn summarization approaches were most effective on the database of fiction, while all five summarization approaches were similarly effective on the database of articles. Overall, the Luhn approach was deemed the most generally relevant among those tested. 

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4. Minimally-Supervised Structure-Rich Text Categorization via Learning on Text-Rich Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3442381.3450114  

   Zhang, Xinyang; Zhang, Chenwei; Dong, Xin Luna; Shang, Jingbo; Han, Jiawei (April 2021, WWW '21: The Web Conference 2021)

   null (Ed.)

   Text categorization is an essential task in Web content analysis. Considering the ever-evolving Web data and new emerging categories, instead of the laborious supervised setting, in this paper, we focus on the minimally-supervised setting that aims to categorize documents effectively, with a couple of seed documents annotated per category. We recognize that texts collected from the Web are often structure-rich, i.e., accompanied by various metadata. One can easily organize the corpus into a text-rich network, joining raw text documents with document attributes, high-quality phrases, label surface names as nodes, and their associations as edges. Such a network provides a holistic view of the corpus’ heterogeneous data sources and enables a joint optimization for network-based analysis and deep textual model training. We therefore propose a novel framework for minimally supervised categorization by learning from the text-rich network. Specifically, we jointly train two modules with different inductive biases – a text analysis module for text understanding and a network learning module for class-discriminative, scalable network learning. Each module generates pseudo training labels from the unlabeled document set, and both modules mutually enhance each other by co-training using pooled pseudo labels. We test our model on two real-world datasets. On the challenging e-commerce product categorization dataset with 683 categories, our experiments show that given only three seed documents per category, our framework can achieve an accuracy of about 92%, significantly outperforming all compared methods; our accuracy is only less than 2% away from the supervised BERT model trained on about 50K labeled documents. 

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5. PELMS: Pre-training for Effective Low-Shot Multi-Document Summarization

   Peper, Joseph J; Qiu, Wenzhao; Wang, Lu (June 2024, Proceedings of the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL))

   We investigate pre-training techniques for abstractive multi-document summarization (MDS), which is much less studied than summarizing single documents. Though recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of highlighting information salience for pretraining strategy design, they struggle to generate abstractive and reflective summaries, which are critical properties for MDS. To this end, we present PELMS, a pre-trained model that uses pre-training objectives based on semantic coherence heuristics and faithfulness constraints together with unlabeled multi-document inputs, to promote the generation of concise, fluent, and faithful summaries. To support the training of PELMS, we compile MultiPT, a multidocument pre-training corpus containing over 93 million documents to form more than 3 million unlabeled topic-centric document clusters, covering diverse genres such as product reviews, news, and general knowledge. We perform extensive evaluation of PELMS in lowshot settings on a wide range of MDS datasets. Our approach consistently outperforms competitive comparisons with respect to overall informativeness, abstractiveness, coherence, and faithfulness, and with minimal fine-tuning can match performance of language models at a much larger scale (e.g., GPT-4). 

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