Long document summarization systems are critical for domains with lengthy and jargonladen text, yet they present significant challenges to researchers and developers with limited computing resources. Existing solutions mainly focus on efficient attentions or divideand- conquer strategies. The former reduces theoretical time complexity, but is still memoryheavy. The latter methods sacrifice global context, leading to uninformative and incoherent summaries. This work aims to leverage the memory-efficient nature of divide-and-conquer methods while preserving global context. Concretely, our framework AWESOME uses two novel mechanisms: (1) External memory mechanisms track previously encoded document segments and their corresponding summaries, to enhance global document understanding and summary coherence. (2) Global salient content is further identified beforehand to augment each document segment to support its summarization. Extensive experiments on diverse genres of text, including government reports, meeting transcripts, screenplays, scientific papers, and novels, show that AWESOME produces summaries with improved informativeness, faithfulness, and coherence than competitive baselines on longer documents, while having a smaller GPU memory footprint.
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HIBRIDS: Attention with Hierarchical Biases for Structure-aware Long Document Summarization
Document structure is critical for efficient information consumption. However, it is challenging to encode it efficiently into the modern Transformer architecture. In this work, we present HIBRIDS, which injects Hierarchical Biases foR Incorporating Document Structure into the calculation of attention scores. We further present a new task, hierarchical question-summary generation, for summarizing salient content in the source document into a hierarchy of questions and summaries, where each follow-up question inquires about the content of its parent question-summary pair. We also annotate a new dataset with 6, 153 question-summary hierarchies labeled on long government reports. Experiment results show that our model produces better question-summary hierarchies than comparisons on both hierarchy quality and content coverage, a finding also echoed by human judges. Additionally, our model improves the generation of long-form summaries from lengthy government reports and Wikipedia articles, as measured by ROUGE scores.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2046016
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10518828
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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