The evaluation of abstractive summarization models typically uses test data that is identically distributed as training data. In real-world practice, documents to be summarized may contain input noise caused by text extraction artifacts or data pipeline bugs. The robustness of model performance under distribution shift caused by such noise is relatively under-studied. We present a large empirical study quantifying the sometimes severe loss in performance (up to 12 ROUGE-1 points) from different types of input noise for a range of datasets and model sizes. We then propose a light-weight method for detecting and removing such noise in the input during model inference without requiring any extra training, auxiliary models, or even prior knowledge of the type of noise. Our proposed approach effectively mitigates the loss in performance, recovering a large fraction of the performance drop, sometimes as large as 11 ROUGE-1 points.

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.

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

Transfer learning, where a model is first pre-trained on a data-rich task before being finetuned on a downstream task, has emerged as a powerful technique in natural language processing (NLP). The effectiveness of transfer learning has given rise to a diversity of approaches, methodology, and practice. In this paper, we explore the landscape of transfer learning techniques for NLP by introducing a unified framework that converts all text-based language problems into a text-to-text format. Our systematic study compares pre-training objectives, architectures, unlabeled data sets, transfer approaches, and other factors on dozens of language understanding tasks. By combining the insights from our exploration with scale and our new "Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus", we achieve state-of-the-art results on many benchmarks covering summarization, question answering, text classification, and more. To facilitate future work on transfer learning for NLP, we release our data set, pre-trained models, and code.

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。

最近的工作表明，（1）增加输入长度或（2）增加模型大小可以提高基于变压器的神经模型的性能。在本文中，我们提出了一个名为Longt5的新模型，我们探讨了同时缩放输入长度和模型大小的效果。具体而言，我们综合了从长输入变压器（ETC）的关注思路，并采用了从摘要预训练（PEGASU）的预训练策略进入可扩展的T5架构。结果是我们称之为{\ EM瞬态全球}（TGLOBAL）的新关注机制，这些机制是模仿等本地/全球注意力机制，但不需要额外的侧面输入。我们能够实现最先进的结果，以若干摘要任务，优于问题应答任务的原始T5模型。

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.

We present BART, a denoising autoencoder for pretraining sequence-to-sequence models. BART is trained by ( 1) corrupting text with an arbitrary noising function, and (2) learning a model to reconstruct the original text. It uses a standard Tranformer-based neural machine translation architecture which, despite its simplicity, can be seen as generalizing BERT (due to the bidirectional encoder), GPT (with the left-to-right decoder), and many other more recent pretraining schemes. We evaluate a number of noising approaches, finding the best performance by both randomly shuffling the order of the original sentences and using a novel in-filling scheme, where spans of text are replaced with a single mask token. BART is particularly effective when fine tuned for text generation but also works well for comprehension tasks. It matches the performance of RoBERTa with comparable training resources on GLUE and SQuAD, achieves new stateof-the-art results on a range of abstractive dialogue, question answering, and summarization tasks, with gains of up to 6 ROUGE. BART also provides a 1.1 BLEU increase over a back-translation system for machine translation, with only target language pretraining. We also report ablation experiments that replicate other pretraining schemes within the BART framework, to better measure which factors most influence end-task performance.

长文件摘要是自然语言处理领域的重要且艰巨的任务。良好的长文件摘要表现揭示了模型对人类语言的理解。目前，大多数研究侧重于如何修改变压器的注意机制，实现更高的胭脂分数。数据预处理和后处理的研究相对较少。在本文中，我们使用两个预处理方法和后处理方法，并分析了这些方法对各种长文件摘要模型的影响。

对比学习模型在无监督的视觉表示学习中取得了巨大成功，这使得相同图像的不同视图的特征表示之间的相似性最大化，同时最小化不同图像的视图的特征表示之间的相似性。在文本摘要中，输出摘要是输入文档的较短形式，它们具有类似的含义。在本文中，我们提出了对监督抽象文本摘要的对比学习模型，在那里我们查看文档，它的金摘要及其模型生成的摘要，与相同的平均表示的不同视图，并在培训期间最大化它们之间的相似性。我们在三个不同的摘要数据集上改进了一个强序列到序列文本生成模型（即，BART）。人类评估还表明，与其对应物相比，我们的模型达到了更好的忠实性评级，没有对比的目标。

维基百科是可理解知识的重要自由来源。尽管如此，巴西葡萄牙维基百科仍然缺乏对许多科目的描述。为了扩大巴西维基百科，我们贡献了Plsum，这是一种从多个描述性网站生成类似的Wiki的抽象摘要的框架。该框架具有提取阶段，然后是抽象。特别是，对于抽象阶段，我们微调并比较了变压器神经网络，PTT5和啰覆的最近最近的变化。为了微调和评估模型，我们创建了一个具有数千个示例的数据集，将参考网站链接到维基百科。我们的结果表明，可以从巴西葡萄牙语网上内容生成有意义的抽象摘要。

本文介绍了Z-Code ++，这是一种针对抽象文本摘要优化的新的预训练的语言模型。该模型使用三种技术扩展了艺术编码器模型的状态。首先，我们使用两阶段的预训练过程来改善模型在低资源摘要任务上的性能。该模型首先是使用文本语料库进行语言理解的预先培训的，然后在汇总语料库中不断预先培训，以进行基础文本生成。其次，我们用分离的注意力层代替编码器中的自我发项层，其中每个单词都使用两个向量分别代表其内容和位置。第三，我们使用融合编码器，这是一种以层次方式编码长序列的简单而有效的方法。 Z-Code ++在13个文本摘要任务中的9个跨5种语言中创建了新的艺术状态。我们的模型的参数有效，因为它的表现优于XSUM上600倍较大的Palm-540b，并且在Samsum上的易经的200倍GPT3-175B较大。在零射击和少量设置中，我们的模型大大优于竞争模型。

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

In this work, we explore a useful but often neglected methodology for robustness analysis of text generation evaluation metrics: stress tests with synthetic data. Basically, we design and synthesize a wide range of potential errors and check whether they result in a commensurate drop in the metric scores. We examine a range of recently proposed evaluation metrics based on pretrained language models, for the tasks of open-ended generation, translation, and summarization. Our experiments reveal interesting insensitivities, biases, or even loopholes in existing metrics. For example, we find that BERTScore ignores truncation errors in summarization, and MAUVE (built on top of GPT-2) is insensitive to errors at the beginning of generations. Further, we investigate the reasons behind these blind spots and suggest practical workarounds for a more reliable evaluation of text generation.

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。

Abstractive summarization has enjoyed renewed interest in recent years, thanks to pre-trained language models and the availability of large-scale datasets. Despite promising results, current models still suffer from generating factually inconsistent summaries, reducing their utility for real-world application. Several recent efforts attempt to address this by devising models that automatically detect factual inconsistencies in machine generated summaries. However, they focus exclusively on English, a language with abundant resources. In this work, we leverage factual consistency evaluation models to improve multilingual summarization. We explore two intuitive approaches to mitigate hallucinations based on the signal provided by a multilingual NLI model, namely data filtering and controlled generation. Experimental results in the 45 languages from the XLSum dataset show gains over strong baselines in both automatic and human evaluation.

在摘要域中，摘要的关键要求是与输入文档一致。以前的工作发现，当应用于不一致检测时，自然语言推理（NLI）模型不会竞争地执行。在这项工作中，我们重新访问NLI的使用进行不一致检测，发现过去的工作遭到了NLI数据集（句子级）与不一致检测（文档级别）之间的输入粒度不匹配。我们提供称为SummacConv的高效和轻量级方法，使NLI模型能够通过将文档分段为句子单元并在句子对之间聚合得分来成功地用于此任务。在我们的新推出的基准名为Summac（简介一致性）中由六个大的不一致检测数据集组成，SummacConv以74.4％的均衡精度获得最先进的结果，与现有工作相比，5％的点改进。我们制作可用的模型和数据集：https://github.com/tingofurro/summac

尽管最近的抽象性摘要在自动评估指标上取得了成功，但生成的摘要仍然与源文档呈现事实不一致。在本文中，我们专注于实体级别的事实不一致，即减少生成的摘要与源文档之间的不匹配实体。因此，我们提出了一种基于实体的新型跨度机制，并通过全球相关成分探索其扩展。四个摘要数据集的实验结果表明，跨度可以有效地改善实体级别的事实一致性，而单词级别和实体级别的显着性基本上没有变化。该代码可在https://github.com/wendy-xiao/entity基于基础上找到

在本文中，我们建议利用对话的独特特征，共享参与者的常识性知识，以解决总结它们的困难。我们提出了病态的框架，该框架使用常识推论作为其他背景。与以前仅依赖于输入对话的工作相比，Sick使用外部知识模型来生成丰富的常识推断，并选择具有基于相似性选择方法的最可能的推理。基于生病的，病人++的理解为监督，在总结多任务学习环境中的对话时，添加了产生常识推断的任务。实验结果表明，通过注入常识性知识，我们的框架比现有方法产生更多信息和一致的摘要。