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.

以查询为中心的摘要（QFS）旨在产生应答感兴趣的特定问题的摘要，从而实现更大的用户控制和个性化。虽然最近发布的数据集如QMSUM或Aquamuse，促进QFS中的研究工作，但该领域缺乏对适用建模方法的广泛空间的全面研究。在本文中，考虑到两种普遍的方法，我们对QFS进行了系统探索，探讨了QFS：两阶段的采掘解决方案和端到端模型。在这些类别中，我们调查现有方法，并呈现了在QMSUM数据集上实现最先进的性能的两个模型扩展，其边缘高达3.38 Rouge-1，3.72 Rouge-2和3.28 Rouge-L。通过定量实验，我们突出了不同模型配置之间的权衡，并探讨了摘要任务之间的转移能力。代码和检查点公开可用：https：//github.com/salesforce/query-focused-sum。

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.

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。

查询聚焦的文本摘要（QFTS）任务旨在构建基于给定查询的文本文档摘要的构建系统。解决此任务的关键挑战是缺乏培训摘要模型的大量标记数据。在本文中，我们通过探索一系列域适应技术来解决这一挑战。鉴于最近在广泛的自然语言处理任务中进行预先接受的变压器模型的成功，我们利用此类模型为单文档和多文件方案的QFTS任务产生抽象摘要。对于域适应，我们使用预先训练的变压器的摘要模型应用了各种技术，包括转移学习，弱监督学习和远程监督。六个数据集的广泛实验表明，我们所提出的方法非常有效地为QFTS任务产生抽象摘要，同时在一组自动和人类评估指标上设置新的最先进的结果。

Recent lay language generation systems have used Transformer models trained on a parallel corpus to increase health information accessibility. However, the applicability of these models is constrained by the limited size and topical breadth of available corpora. We introduce CELLS, the largest (63k pairs) and broadest-ranging (12 journals) parallel corpus for lay language generation. The abstract and the corresponding lay language summary are written by domain experts, assuring the quality of our dataset. Furthermore, qualitative evaluation of expert-authored plain language summaries has revealed background explanation as a key strategy to increase accessibility. Such explanation is challenging for neural models to generate because it goes beyond simplification by adding content absent from the source. We derive two specialized paired corpora from CELLS to address key challenges in lay language generation: generating background explanations and simplifying the original abstract. We adopt retrieval-augmented models as an intuitive fit for the task of background explanation generation, and show improvements in summary quality and simplicity while maintaining factual correctness. Taken together, this work presents the first comprehensive study of background explanation for lay language generation, paving the path for disseminating scientific knowledge to a broader audience. CELLS is publicly available at: https://github.com/LinguisticAnomalies/pls_retrieval.

长表质疑应答（LFQA）任务要求将相关的文件检索到查询，使用它们形成段落长度答案。尽管LFQA建模相当大，但基本问题妨碍了其进度：i）火车/验证/测试数据集重叠，ii）缺少自动度量标准和III）在检索的文档中产生的答案不会“接地”。这项工作解决了这些关键瓶颈的每一个，有助于自然语言推理/生成（NLI / NLG）方法和指标，使其减轻重大进展。

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。

知识密集型语言任务（苏格兰信）通常需要大量信息来提供正确的答案。解决此问题的一种流行范式是将搜索系统与机器读取器相结合，前者检索支持证据，后者检查它们以产生答案。最近，读者组成部分在大规模预培养的生成模型的帮助下见证了重大进展。同时，搜索组件中的大多数现有解决方案都依赖于传统的``索引 - retrieve-then-Rank''管道，该管道遭受了巨大的内存足迹和端到端优化的困难。受到最新构建基于模型的IR模型的努力的启发，我们建议用新颖的单步生成模型替换传统的多步搜索管道，该模型可以极大地简化搜索过程并以端到端的方式进行优化。我们表明，可以通过一组经过适当设计的预训练任务来学习强大的生成检索模型，并被采用以通过进一步的微调来改善各种下游苏格兰短裙任务。我们将预训练的生成检索模型命名为Copusbrain，因为有关该语料库的所有信息均以其参数进行编码，而无需构造其他索引。经验结果表明，在苏格兰语基准上的检索任务并建立了新的最新性能，Copusbrain可以极大地超过强大的基准。我们还表明，在零农源和低资源设置下，科体班运行良好。

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

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

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.

侧重于查询的摘要（QFS）需要生成使用一组相关文档的查询给出文本摘要。但是，在实践中，此类相关文件不易获得，但应首先从文档收集中检索。因此，我们展示了如何扩展此任务以使其更加逼真。因此，任务设置也类似于开放式域问题应答任务的设置，其中答案是顶部检索到的文档的摘要。要解决此扩展任务，我们将通过文本生成组合通过文本生成来产生给定输入查询的检索段落的摘要。我们展示了第一个对拟议任务的评估结果，并表明一些样本足以通过检索的通道进行微调的大型生成模型。

NLP基准在很大程度上主要集中在短篇文本上，例如句子和段落，即使长文本在野外占相当数量的自然语言。我们介绍卷轴，这是一套需要在长文本上推理的任务套件。我们检查现有的长文本数据集，文本自然是长期的，同时优先考虑涉及在输入上扫描信息的任务。滚动包含概述，问题应答和自然语言推理任务，包括多个域，包括文学，科学，业务和娱乐。初始基线（包括啰覆编码器），表明滚动有充足的改进空间。我们以统一的文本到文本格式提供所有数据集，并托管Live Refordboard，以促进模型架构和预用方法的研究。

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.

自动摘要评估对于机器生成和人为生产的摘要都有用。自动评估给定文档的摘要文本启用，例如，摘要生成系统开发和检测不适当的摘要。摘要评估可以以多种模式进行：排名摘要生成系统；对特定文档的排名摘要；并在绝对规模上估算文档 - 苏格尔对的质量。带有注释的现有数据集用于摘要评估，通常基于新闻摘要数据集，例如CNN/DailyMail或XSUM。在这项工作中，我们描述了一个新的数据集，即播客摘要评估语料库，这是由TREC2020的人类专家评估的播客摘要集。与现有的摘要评估数据相比，该数据集具有两个独特的方面：（i）基于语音播客的长输入，文档； （ii）有机会在播客语料库中检测不适当的参考摘要。首先，我们检查了现有的评估方法，包括无模型和基于模型的方法，并为此长输入摘要评估数据集提供基准结果。其次，为了过滤参考参考文献配对以进行培训，我们采用摘要评估进行数据选择。这两个方面的实验结果为摘要评估和发电任务提供了有趣的见解。播客摘要评估数据可用。

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。

Content-Controllable Summarization generates summaries focused on the given controlling signals. Due to the lack of large-scale training corpora for the task, we propose a plug-and-play module RelAttn to adapt any general summarizers to the content-controllable summarization task. RelAttn first identifies the relevant content in the source documents, and then makes the model attend to the right context by directly steering the attention weight. We further apply an unsupervised online adaptive parameter searching algorithm to determine the degree of control in the zero-shot setting, while such parameters are learned in the few-shot setting. By applying the module to three backbone summarization models, experiments show that our method effectively improves all the summarizers, and outperforms the prefix-based method and a widely used plug-and-play model in both zero- and few-shot settings. Tellingly, more benefit is observed in the scenarios when more control is needed.

Human evaluation is the foundation upon which the evaluation of both summarization systems and automatic metrics rests. However, existing human evaluation protocols and benchmarks for summarization either exhibit low inter-annotator agreement or lack the scale needed to draw statistically significant conclusions, and an in-depth analysis of human evaluation is lacking. In this work, we address the shortcomings of existing summarization evaluation along the following axes: 1) We propose a modified summarization salience protocol, Atomic Content Units (ACUs), which relies on fine-grained semantic units and allows for high inter-annotator agreement. 2) We curate the Robust Summarization Evaluation (RoSE) benchmark, a large human evaluation dataset consisting of over 22k summary-level annotations over state-of-the-art systems on three datasets. 3) We compare our ACU protocol with three other human evaluation protocols, underscoring potential confounding factors in evaluation setups. 4) We evaluate existing automatic metrics using the collected human annotations across evaluation protocols and demonstrate how our benchmark leads to more statistically stable and significant results. Furthermore, our findings have important implications for evaluating large language models (LLMs), as we show that LLMs adjusted by human feedback (e.g., GPT-3.5) may overfit unconstrained human evaluation, which is affected by the annotators' prior, input-agnostic preferences, calling for more robust, targeted evaluation methods.

We study the problem of retrieval with instructions, where users of a retrieval system explicitly describe their intent along with their queries. We aim to develop a general-purpose task-aware retrieval system using multi-task instruction tuning, which can follow human-written instructions to find the best documents for a given query. We introduce the first large-scale collection of approximately 40 retrieval datasets with instructions, BERRI, and present TART, a multi-task retrieval system trained on BERRI with instructions. TART shows strong capabilities to adapt to a new retrieval task via instructions and advances the state of the art on two zero-shot retrieval benchmarks, BEIR and LOTTE, outperforming models up to three times larger. We further introduce a new evaluation setup, X^2-Retrieval to better reflect real-world scenarios, where diverse domains and tasks are pooled and a system needs to find documents aligning users' intents. In this setup, TART significantly outperforms competitive baselines, further demonstrating the effectiveness of guiding retrieval with instructions.