We present a neural framework for opinion summarization from online product reviews which is knowledge-lean and only requires light supervision (e.g., in the form of product domain labels and user-provided ratings). Our method combines two weakly supervised components to identify salient opinions and form extractive summaries from multiple reviews: an aspect extractor trained under a multi-task objective, and a sentiment predictor based on multiple instance learning. We introduce an opinion summarization dataset that includes a training set of product reviews from six diverse domains and human-annotated development and test sets with gold standard aspect annotations, salience labels, and opinion summaries. Automatic evaluation shows significant improvements over baselines, and a large-scale study indicates that our opinion summaries are preferred by human judges according to multiple criteria.
A few extractive neural models have been recently applied to generic multi-document summarization. train a recursive neural network using a ranking objective to identify salient sentences, while follow-up work @cite_0 employs a multi-task objective to improve sentence extraction, an idea we adapted to our task. propose a graph convolution network to represent sentence relations and estimate sentence salience. Our summarization method is tailored to the opinion extraction task, it identifies aspect-specific and salient units, while minimizing the redundancy of the final summary with a greedy selection algorithm @cite_16 @cite_26 . Redundancy is also addressed in who propose a graph-based framework for abstractive summarization. introduce an encoder-decoder neural method for extractive opinion summarization. Their approach requires direct supervision via gold-standard extractive summaries for training, in contrast to our weakly supervised formulation.
@cite_0 @cite_16 @cite_26
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We propose a neural multi-document summarization (MDS) system that incorporates sentence relation graphs. We employ a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) on the relation graphs, with sentence embeddings obtained from Recurrent Neural Networks as input node features. Through multiple layer-wise propagation, the GCN generates high-level hidden sentence features for salience estimation. We then use a greedy heuristic to extract salient sentences while avoiding redundancy. In our experiments on DUC 2004, we consider three types of sentence relation graphs and demonstrate the advantage of combining sentence relations in graphs with the representation power of deep neural networks. Our model improves upon traditional graph-based extractive approaches and the vanilla GRU sequence model with no graph, and it achieves competitive results against other state-of-the-art multi-document summarization systems. We develop a Ranking framework upon Recursive Neural Networks (R2N2) to rank sentences for multi-document summarization. It formulates the sentence ranking task as a hierarchical regression process, which simultaneously measures the salience of a sentence and its constituents (e.g., phrases) in the parsing tree. This enables us to draw on word-level to sentence-level supervisions derived from reference summaries. In addition, recursive neural networks are used to automatically learn ranking features over the tree, with hand-crafted feature vectors of words as inputs. Hierarchical regressions are then conducted with learned features concatenating raw features. Ranking scores of sentences and words are utilized to effectively select informative and non-redundant sentences to generate summaries. Experiments on the DUC 2001, 2002 and 2004 multi-document summarization datasets show that R2N2 outperforms state-of-the-art extractive summarization approaches. In this paper, we explore how to use ranking SVM to train the feature weights for query-focused multi-document summarization. To apply a supervised learning method to sentence extraction in multi-document summarization, we need to derive the sentence labels for training corpus from the existing human labeling data in form of. However, this process is not trivial, because the human summaries are abstractive, and do not necessarily well match the sentences in the documents. In this paper, we try to address the above problem from the following two aspects. First, we make use of sentence-to-sentence relationships to better estimate the probability of a sentence in the document set to be a summary sentence. Second, to make the derived training data less sensitive, we adopt a cost sensitive loss in the ranking SVM's objective function. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Extractive summarization aims to generate a summary by ranking sentences, whose performance relies heavily on the quality of sentence features. In this paper, a document summarization framework based on convolutional neural networks is successfully developed to learn sentence features and perform sentence ranking jointly. We adapt the original CNN model to address a regression process for sentence ranking. Pre-trained word vectors are used to enhance the performance of our model. We evaluate our proposed method on the DUC 2002 and 2004 datasets covering single and multi-document summarization tasks respectively. The proposed system achieves competitive or even better performance compared with state-of-the-art document summarization systems. In this paper, we study the aspect-based extractive summarization based on the observations that a good summary should present representative opinions on user concerned sub-aspects within limited words. According to these observations, we argue that, two requirements, i.e. representativeness and diversity, should be considered for generating a good summary in addition to the traditional requirements of aspect-relevance and sentiment intensity. We focus on the intrinsic relationship between sentences and the dependency between extracted sentences for summarization, and thus propose a novel aspect-based summarization method for online reviews, which employs an Aspect-sensitive Markov Random Walk Model to meet the representativeness requirement, as well as a greedy redundancy removal method to meet the diversity requirement. The conducted experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing it with the baselines which ignores representativeness and or diversity. The experimental results also show that, the two requirements we present are both indispensable for a good summary. Extractive document summarization aims to conclude given documents by extracting some salient sentences. Often, it faces two challenges: 1) how to model the information redundancy among candidate sentences; 2) how to select the most appropriate sentences. This paper attempts to build a strong summarizer DivSelect+CNNLM by presenting new algorithms to optimize each of them. Concretely, it proposes CNNLM, a novel neural network language model (NNLM) based on convolutional neural network (CNN), to project sentences into dense distributed representations, then models sentence redundancy by cosine similarity. Afterwards, it formulates the selection process as an optimization problem, constructing a diversified selection process (DivSelect) with the aim of selecting some sentences which have high prestige, meantime, are dissimilar with each other. Experimental results on DUC2002 and DUC2004 benchmark data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. In this paper, we propose two generic text summarization methods that create text summaries by ranking and extracting sentences from the original documents. The first method uses standard IR methods to rank sentence relevances, while the second method uses the latent semantic analysis technique to identify semantically important sentences, for summary creations. Both methods strive to select sentences that are highly ranked and different from each other. This is an attempt to create a summary with a wider coverage of the document's main content and less redundancy. Performance evaluations on the two summarization methods are conducted by comparing their summarization outputs with the manual summaries generated by three independent human evaluators. The evaluations also study the influence of different VSM weighting schemes on the text summarization performances. Finally, the causes of the large disparities in the evaluators' manual summarization results are investigated, and discussions on human text summarization patterns are presented. This paper presents a pilot study of opinion summarization on conversations. We create a corpus containing extractive and abstractive summaries of speaker's opinion towards a given topic using 88 telephone conversations. We adopt two methods to perform extractive summarization. The first one is a sentence-ranking method that linearly combines scores measured from different aspects including topic relevance, subjectivity, and sentence importance. The second one is a graph-based method, which incorporates topic and sentiment information, as well as additional information about sentence-to-sentence relations extracted based on dialogue structure. Our evaluation results show that both methods significantly outperform the baseline approach that extracts the longest utterances. In particular, we find that incorporating dialogue structure in the graph-based method contributes to the improved system performance. Scoring sentences in documents given abstract summaries created by humans is important in extractive multi-document summarization. In this paper, we formulate extractive summarization as a two step learning problem building a generative model for pattern discovery and a regression model for inference. We calculate scores for sentences in document clusters based on their latent characteristics using a hierarchical topic model. Then, using these scores, we train a regression model based on the lexical and structural characteristics of the sentences, and use the model to score sentences of new documents to form a summary. Our system advances current state-of-the-art improving ROUGE scores by 7 . Generated summaries are less redundant and more coherent based upon manual quality evaluations. Multi-document summarization has been an important problem in information retrieval. It aims to distill the most important information from a set of documents to generate a compressed summary. Given a sentence graph generated from a set of documents where vertices represent sentences and edges indicate that the corresponding vertices are similar, the extracted summary can be described using the idea of graph domination. In this paper, we propose a new principled and versatile framework for multi-document summarization using the minimum dominating set. We show that four well-known summarization tasks including generic, query-focused, update, and comparative summarization can be modeled as different variations derived from the proposed framework. Approximation algorithms for performing summarization are also proposed and empirical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. We show that generating English Wikipedia articles can be approached as a multi- document summarization of source documents. We use extractive summarization to coarsely identify salient information and a neural abstractive model to generate the article. For the abstractive model, we introduce a decoder-only architecture that can scalably attend to very long sequences, much longer than typical encoder- decoder architectures used in sequence transduction. We show that this model can generate fluent, coherent multi-sentence paragraphs and even whole Wikipedia articles. When given reference documents, we show it can extract relevant factual information as reflected in perplexity, ROUGE scores and human evaluations. This paper presents a study of a novel summarization problem called contrastive opinion summarization (COS). Given two sets of positively and negatively opinionated sentences which are often the output of an existing opinion summarizer, COS aims to extract comparable sentences from each set of opinions and generate a comparative summary containing a set of contrastive sentence pairs. We formally formulate the problem as an optimization problem and propose two general methods for generating a comparative summary using the framework, both of which rely on measuring the content similarity and contrastive similarity of two sentences. We study several strategies to compute these two similarities. We also create a test data set for evaluating such a novel summarization problem. Experiment results on this test set show that the proposed methods are effective for generating comparative summaries of contradictory opinions. Query relevance ranking and sentence saliency ranking are the two main tasks in extractive query-focused summarization. Previous supervised summarization systems often perform the two tasks in isolation. However, since reference summaries are the trade-off between relevance and saliency, using them as supervision, neither of the two rankers could be trained well. This paper proposes a novel summarization system called AttSum, which tackles the two tasks jointly. It automatically learns distributed representations for sentences as well as the document cluster. Meanwhile, it applies the attention mechanism to simulate the attentive reading of human behavior when a query is given. Extensive experiments are conducted on DUC query-focused summarization benchmark datasets. Without using any hand-crafted features, AttSum achieves competitive performance. It is also observed that the sentences recognized to focus on the query indeed meet the query need. Comments left by readers on Web documents contain valuable information that can be utilized in different information retrieval tasks including document search, visualization, and summarization. In this paper, we study the problem of comments-oriented document summarization and aim to summarize a Web document (e.g., a blog post) by considering not only its content, but also the comments left by its readers. We identify three relations (namely, topic, quotation, and mention) by which comments can be linked to one another, and model the relations in three graphs. The importance of each comment is then scored by: (i) graph-based method, where the three graphs are merged into a multi-relation graph; (ii) tensor-based method, where the three graphs are used to construct a 3rd-order tensor. To generate a comments-oriented summary, we extract sentences from the given Web document using either feature-biased approach or uniform-document approach. The former scores sentences to bias keywords derived from comments; while the latter scores sentences uniformly with comments. In our experiments using a set of blog posts with manually labeled sentences, our proposed summarization methods utilizing comments showed significant improvement over those not using comments. The methods using feature-biased sentence extraction approach were observed to outperform that using uniform-document approach. A citing sentence is one that appears in a scientific article and cites previous work. Citing sentences have been studied and used in many applications. For example, they have been used in scientific paper summarization, automatic survey generation, paraphrase identification, and citation function classification. Citing sentences that cite multiple papers are common in scientific writing. This observation should be taken into consideration when using citing sentences in applications. For instance, when a citing sentence is used in a summary of a scientific paper, only the fragments of the sentence that are relevant to the summarized paper should be included in the summary. In this paper, we present and compare three different approaches for identifying the fragments of a citing sentence that are related to a given target reference. Our methods are: word classification, sequence labeling, and segment classification. Our experiments show that segment classification achieves the best results. Many methods, including supervised and unsupervised algorithms, have been developed for extractive document summarization. Most supervised methods consider the summarization task as a two-class classification problem and classify each sentence individually without leveraging the relationship among sentences. The unsupervised methods use heuristic rules to select the most informative sentences into a summary directly, which are hard to generalize. In this paper, we present a Conditional Random Fields (CRF) based framework to keep the merits of the above two kinds of approaches while avoiding their disadvantages. What is more, the proposed framework can take the outcomes of previous methods as features and seamlessly integrate them. The key idea of our approach is to treat the summarization task as a sequence labeling problem. In this view, each document is a sequence of sentences and the summarization procedure labels the sentences by 1 and 0. The label of a sentence depends on the assignment of labels of others. We compared our proposed approach with eight existing methods on an open benchmark data set. The results show that our approach can improve the performance by more than 7.1 and 12.1 over the best supervised baseline and unsupervised baseline respectively in terms of two popular metrics F1 and ROUGE-2. Detailed analysis of the improvement is presented as well. Traditional approaches to extractive summarization rely heavily on humanengineered features. In this work we propose a data-driven approach based on neural networks and continuous sentence features. We develop a general framework for single-document summarization composed of a hierarchical document encoder and an attention-based extractor. This architecture allows us to develop different classes of summarization models which can extract sentences or words. We train our models on large scale corpora containing hundreds of thousands of document-summary pairs 1 . Experimental results on two summarization datasets demonstrate that our models obtain results comparable to the state of the art without any access to linguistic annotation. Traditional approaches to extractive summarization rely heavily on human-engineered features. In this work we propose a data-driven approach based on neural networks and continuous sentence features. We develop a general framework for single-document summarization composed of a hierarchical document encoder and an attention-based extractor. This architecture allows us to develop different classes of summarization models which can extract sentences or words. We train our models on large scale corpora containing hundreds of thousands of document-summary pairs. Experimental results on two summarization datasets demonstrate that our models obtain results comparable to the state of the art without any access to linguistic annotation. We present a dual decomposition framework for multi-document summarization, using a model that jointly extracts and compresses sentences. Compared with previous work based on integer linear programming, our approach does not require external solvers, is significantly faster, and is modular in the three qualities a summary should have: conciseness, informativeness, and grammaticality. In addition, we propose a multi-task learning framework to take advantage of existing data for extractive summarization and sentence compression. Experiments in the TAC2008 dataset yield the highest published ROUGE scores to date, with runtimes that rival those of extractive summarizers. Web queries often give rise to a lot of documents and the user is overwhelmed by the information. Query-specific extractive summarization of a selected set of retrieved documents helps the user to get a gist of the information. The current extractive summary generation systems focus on extracting query-relevant sentences from the documents. However, the selected sentences are presented either in the order in which the documents were considered or in the order in which they were selected. This approach does not guarantee a coherent summary. In this paper, we propose incremental integrated graph to represent the sentences in a collection of documents. Sentences from the documents are merged into a master sequence to improve coherence and flow. The same ordering is used for sequencing the sentences in the extracted summary. User evaluations indicate that the proposed technique markedly improves the user satisfaction with regard to coherence in the summary.