Though many algorithms can be used to automatically summarize legal case decisions, most fail to incorporate domain knowledge about how important sentences in a legal decision relate to a representation of its document structure. For example, analysis of a legal case summarization dataset demonstrates that sentences serving different types of argumentative roles in the decision appear in different sections of the document. In this work, we propose an unsupervised graph-based ranking model that uses a reweighting algorithm to exploit properties of the document structure of legal case decisions. We also explore the impact of using different methods to compute the document structure. Results on the Canadian Legal Case Law dataset show that our proposed method outperforms several strong baselines.

诸如学术文章和商业报告之类的长期文件一直是详细说明重要问题和需要额外关注的复杂主题的标准格式。自动汇总系统可以有效地将长文档置于简短而简洁的文本中，以封装最重要的信息，从而在帮助读者的理解中很重要。最近，随着神经体系结构的出现，已经做出了重大的研究工作，以推动自动文本摘要系统，以及有关将这些系统扩展到长期文档领域的挑战的大量研究。在这项调查中，我们提供了有关长期文档摘要的研究的全面概述，以及其研究环境的三个主要组成部分的系统评估：基准数据集，汇总模型和评估指标。对于每个组成部分，我们在长期汇总的背景下组织文献，并进行经验分析，以扩大有关当前研究进度的观点。实证分析包括一项研究基准数据集的内在特征，摘要模型的多维分析以及摘要评估指标的综述。根据总体发现，我们通过提出可能在这个快速增长的领域中提出未来探索的方向来得出结论。

生成法律文件摘要时，一项艰巨的任务是解决其论证性质的能力。我们介绍了一种简单的技术，可以通过将论点角色标签整合到摘要过程中来捕获法律文档的论证结构。使用预算语言模型的实验表明，我们提出的方法改善了强大基线的性能

学术研究是解决以前从未解决过的问题的探索活动。通过这种性质，每个学术研究工作都需要进行文献审查，以区分其Novelties尚未通过事先作品解决。在自然语言处理中，该文献综述通常在“相关工作”部分下进行。鉴于研究文件的其余部分和引用的论文列表，自动相关工作生成的任务旨在自动生成“相关工作”部分。虽然这项任务是在10年前提出的，但直到最近，它被认为是作为科学多文件摘要问题的变种。然而，即使在今天，尚未标准化了自动相关工作和引用文本生成的问题。在这项调查中，我们进行了一个元研究，从问题制定，数据集收集，方法方法，绩效评估和未来前景的角度来比较相关工作的现有文献，以便为读者洞察到国家的进步 - 最内容的研究，以及如何进行未来的研究。我们还调查了我们建议未来工作要考虑整合的相关研究领域。

无监督的摘要方法通过纳入预训练的语言模型的表示形式来取得了显着的结果。但是，当输入文档非常长的同时，现有方法无法考虑效率和有效性。为了解决这个问题，在本文中，我们提出了一个基于语义块的无监督长期文档摘要，提议有效的粗到1个方面的排名（C2F-FAR）框架。语义块是指描述相同方面的文档中的连续句子。具体而言，我们通过将一步排名方法转换为层次多范围两阶段排名来解决此问题。在粗级阶段，我们提出了一种新的段算法，将文档拆分为相关的语义块，然后过滤量微不足道的块。在精细阶段，我们在每个块中选择显着句子，然后从选定的句子中提取最终摘要。我们在四个长文档摘要数据集上评估了我们的框架：Gov-Report，Billsum，Arxiv和PubMed。我们的C2F-FAR可以在Gov-Report和Billsum上实现新的无监督摘要结果。此外，我们的方法比以前的方法高4-28倍。

随着大型语言模型的出现，抽象性摘要的方法取得了长足的进步，从而在应用程序中使用了帮助知识工人处理笨拙的文档收集的潜力。一个这样的环境是民权诉讼交换所（CRLC）（https://clearinghouse.net），其中发布了有关大规模民权诉讼，服务律师，学者和公众的信息。如今，CRLC中的摘要需要对律师和法律专业的学生进行广泛的培训，这些律师和法律专业的学生花费数小时了解多个相关文件，以便产生重要事件和结果的高质量摘要。在这种持续的现实世界摘要工作的激励下，我们引入了Multi-iplesum，这是由正在进行的CRLC写作中绘制的9,280个专家作者的摘要集。鉴于源文档的长度，多文章介绍了一个具有挑战性的多文档摘要任务，通常每个情况超过200页。此外，多胎sum与其多个目标摘要中的其他数据集不同，每个数据集都处于不同的粒度（从一句“极端”摘要到超过五百个单词的多段落叙述）。我们提供了广泛的分析，表明，尽管培训数据（遵守严格的内容和样式准则）中的摘要很高，但最新的摘要模型在此任务上的表现较差。我们发布了多体式的摘要方法，以及促进应用程序的开发，以协助CRLC的任务https://multilexsum.github.io。

Text summarization is a user-preference based task, i.e., for one document, users often have different priorities for summary. As a key aspect of customization in summarization, granularity is used to measure the semantic coverage between the summary and source document. However, developing systems that can generate summaries with customizable semantic coverage is still an under-explored topic. In this paper, we propose the first unsupervised multi-granularity summarization framework, GranuSum. We take events as the basic semantic units of the source documents and propose to rank these events by their salience. We also develop a model to summarize input documents with given events as anchors and hints. By inputting different numbers of events, GranuSum is capable of producing multi-granular summaries in an unsupervised manner. Meanwhile, we annotate a new benchmark GranuDUC that contains multiple summaries at different granularities for each document cluster. Experimental results confirm the substantial superiority of GranuSum on multi-granularity summarization over strong baselines. Further, by exploiting the event information, GranuSum also exhibits state-of-the-art performance under the conventional unsupervised abstractive setting. Dataset for this paper can be found at: https://github.com/maszhongming/GranuDUC

在人口稠密的国家中，悬而未决的法律案件呈指数增长。需要开发处理和组织法律文件的技术。在本文中，我们引入了一个新的语料库来构建法律文件。特别是，我们介绍了用英语的法律判断文件进行的，这些文件被分割为局部和连贯的部分。这些零件中的每一个都有注释，标签来自预定义角色的列表。我们开发基线模型，以根据注释语料库自动预测法律文档中的修辞角色。此外，我们展示了修辞角色在提高总结和法律判断预测任务的绩效方面的应用。我们发布了语料库和基线模型代码以及纸张。

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT; Devlin et al. 2019) represents the latest incarnation of pretrained language models which have recently advanced a wide range of natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we showcase how BERT can be usefully applied in text summarization and propose a general framework for both extractive and abstractive models. We introduce a novel document-level encoder based on BERT which is able to express the semantics of a document and obtain representations for its sentences. Our extractive model is built on top of this encoder by stacking several intersentence Transformer layers. For abstractive summarization, we propose a new fine-tuning schedule which adopts different optimizers for the encoder and the decoder as a means of alleviating the mismatch between the two (the former is pretrained while the latter is not). We also demonstrate that a two-staged fine-tuning approach can further boost the quality of the generated summaries. Experiments on three datasets show that our model achieves stateof-the-art results across the board in both extractive and abstractive settings. 1

In a citation graph, adjacent paper nodes share related scientific terms and topics. The graph thus conveys unique structure information of document-level relatedness that can be utilized in the paper summarization task, for exploring beyond the intra-document information. In this work, we focus on leveraging citation graphs to improve scientific paper extractive summarization under different settings. We first propose a Multi-granularity Unsupervised Summarization model (MUS) as a simple and low-cost solution to the task. MUS finetunes a pre-trained encoder model on the citation graph by link prediction tasks. Then, the abstract sentences are extracted from the corresponding paper considering multi-granularity information. Preliminary results demonstrate that citation graph is helpful even in a simple unsupervised framework. Motivated by this, we next propose a Graph-based Supervised Summarization model (GSS) to achieve more accurate results on the task when large-scale labeled data are available. Apart from employing the link prediction as an auxiliary task, GSS introduces a gated sentence encoder and a graph information fusion module to take advantage of the graph information to polish the sentence representation. Experiments on a public benchmark dataset show that MUS and GSS bring substantial improvements over the prior state-of-the-art model.

多文件摘要（MDS）是信息聚合的有效工具，它从与主题相关文档集群生成信息和简洁的摘要。我们的调查是，首先，系统地概述了最近的基于深度学习的MDS模型。我们提出了一种新的分类学，总结神经网络的设计策略，并进行全面的最先进的概要。我们突出了在现有文献中很少讨论的各种客观函数之间的差异。最后，我们提出了与这个新的和令人兴奋的领域有关的几个方向。

Multi-document summarization (MDS) has traditionally been studied assuming a set of ground-truth topic-related input documents is provided. In practice, the input document set is unlikely to be available a priori and would need to be retrieved based on an information need, a setting we call open-domain MDS. We experiment with current state-of-the-art retrieval and summarization models on several popular MDS datasets extended to the open-domain setting. We find that existing summarizers suffer large reductions in performance when applied as-is to this more realistic task, though training summarizers with retrieved inputs can reduce their sensitivity retrieval errors. To further probe these findings, we conduct perturbation experiments on summarizer inputs to study the impact of different types of document retrieval errors. Based on our results, we provide practical guidelines to help facilitate a shift to open-domain MDS. We release our code and experimental results alongside all data or model artifacts created during our investigation.

Legal contracts, such as employment or lease agreements, are important documents as they govern the obligations and entitlements of the various contracting parties. However, these documents are typically long and written in legalese resulting in lots of manual hours spent in understanding them. In this paper, we address the task of summarizing legal contracts for each of the contracting parties, to enable faster reviewing and improved understanding of them. Specifically, we collect a dataset consisting of pairwise importance comparison annotations by legal experts for ~293K sentence pairs from lease agreements. We propose a novel extractive summarization system to automatically produce a summary consisting of the most important obligations, entitlements, and prohibitions in a contract. It consists of two modules: (1) a content categorize to identify sentences containing each of the categories (i.e., obligation, entitlement, and prohibition) for a party, and (2) an importance ranker to compare the importance among sentences of each category for a party to obtain a ranked list. The final summary is produced by selecting the most important sentences of a category for each of the parties. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed system by comparing it against several text ranking baselines via automatic and human evaluation.

传统上，文本简化被视为单语翻译任务，其中源文本及其简化的对应物之间的句子是对齐的。但是，尤其是对于更长的输入文档，总结文本（或完全删除相关内容）在简化过程中起重要作用，目前在现有数据集中尚未反映出该过程。同时，非英语语言的资源通常很少，并且对于培训新解决方案而言是过分的。为了解决这个问题，我们对可以共同总结和简化长源文档的系统提出了核心要求。我们进一步描述了基于德国Wikipedia和德国儿童词典“ Klexikon”的新数据集的创建，用于简化和摘要，包括近2900个文档。我们发布了一个与文档一致的版本，特别突出了摘要方面，并提供了统计证据，表明此资源也非常适合简化。代码和数据可在GitHub上找到：https：//github.com/dennlinger/klexikon

传统上，文本聚类方法包含在多文件摘要（MDS）中作为一种用于应对相当大的信息重复的手段。集群被利用以表明信息显着性并避免冗余。这些方法集中在聚类句子上，即使密切相关的句子也通常包含非对齐信息。在这项工作中，我们重新审视聚类方法，将命题分组为更精确的信息对齐。具体而言，我们的方法检测到突出的命题，将它们聚集到释义集群中，并通过融合其命题来为每个集群生成代表性句子。我们的摘要方法在自动胭脂评分和人类偏好中，通过了在DUC 2004和TAC 2011数据集中的先前最先进的MDS方法。

现有以查询为中心的摘要数据集的大小有限，使培训数据驱动的摘要模型提出了挑战。同时，以查询为重点的摘要语料库的手动构造昂贵且耗时。在本文中，我们使用Wikipedia自动收集超过280，000个示例的大型以查询为中心的摘要数据集（名为Wikiref），这可以用作数据增强的手段。我们还开发了一个基于BERT的以查询为重点的摘要模型（Q-bert），以从文档中提取句子作为摘要。为了更好地调整包含数百万个参数的巨大模型，我们仅识别和微调一个稀疏的子网络，这对应于整个模型参数的一小部分。三个DUC基准测试的实验结果表明，在Wikiref中预先培训的模型已经达到了合理的性能。在对特定基准数据集进行了微调后，具有数据增强的模型优于强大比较系统。此外，我们提出的Q-Bert模型和子网微调都进一步改善了模型性能。该数据集可在https://aka.ms/wikiref上公开获取。

Aspect or query-based summarization has recently caught more attention, as it can generate differentiated summaries based on users' interests. However, the current dataset for aspect or query-based summarization either focuses on specific domains, contains relatively small-scale instances, or includes only a few aspect types. Such limitations hinder further explorations in this direction. In this work, we take advantage of crowd-sourcing knowledge on Wikipedia.org and automatically create a high-quality, large-scale open-domain aspect-based summarization dataset named OASum, which contains more than 3.7 million instances with around 1 million different aspects on 2 million Wikipedia pages. We provide benchmark results on OAsum and demonstrate its ability for diverse aspect-based summarization generation. To overcome the data scarcity problem on specific domains, we also perform zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning on seven downstream datasets. Specifically, zero/few-shot and fine-tuning results show that the model pre-trained on our corpus demonstrates a strong aspect or query-focused generation ability compared with the backbone model. Our dataset and pre-trained checkpoints are publicly available.

Narrative summarization aims to produce a distilled version of a narrative to describe its most salient events and characters. Summarizing a narrative is challenging as it requires an understanding of event causality and character behaviors. To encourage research in this direction, we propose NarraSum, a large-scale narrative summarization dataset. It contains 122K narrative documents, which are collected from plot descriptions of movies and TV episodes with diverse genres, and their corresponding abstractive summaries. Experiments show that there is a large performance gap between humans and the state-of-the-art summarization models on NarraSum. We hope that this dataset will promote future research in summarization, as well as broader studies of natural language understanding and generation. The dataset is available at https://github.com/zhaochaocs/narrasum.

The publication rates are skyrocketing across many fields of science, and it is difficult to stay up to date with the latest research. This makes automatically summarizing the latest findings and helping scholars to synthesize related work in a given area an attractive research objective. In this paper we study the problem of citation text generation, where given a set of cited papers and citing context the model should generate a citation text. While citation text generation has been tackled in prior work, existing studies use different datasets and task definitions, which makes it hard to study citation text generation systematically. To address this, we propose CiteBench: a benchmark for citation text generation that unifies the previous datasets and enables standardized evaluation of citation text generation models across task settings and domains. Using the new benchmark, we investigate the performance of multiple strong baselines, test their transferability between the datasets, and deliver new insights into task definition and evaluation to guide the future research in citation text generation. We make CiteBench publicly available at https://github.com/UKPLab/citebench.

Information overloading requires the need for summarizers to extract salient information from the text. Currently, there is an overload of dialogue data due to the rise of virtual communication platforms. The rise of Covid-19 has led people to rely on online communication platforms like Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, etc. to conduct their company meetings. Instead of going through the entire meeting transcripts, people can use meeting summarizers to select useful data. Nevertheless, there is a lack of comprehensive surveys in the field of meeting summarizers. In this survey, we aim to cover recent meeting summarization techniques. Our survey offers a general overview of text summarization along with datasets and evaluation metrics for meeting summarization. We also provide the performance of each summarizer on a leaderboard. We conclude our survey with different challenges in this domain and potential research opportunities for future researchers.