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

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。

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。

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。

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。

Controllable summarization allows users to generate customized summaries with specified attributes. However, due to the lack of designated annotations of controlled summaries, existing works have to craft pseudo datasets by adapting generic summarization benchmarks. Furthermore, most research focuses on controlling single attributes individually (e.g., a short summary or a highly abstractive summary) rather than controlling a mix of attributes together (e.g., a short and highly abstractive summary). In this paper, we propose MACSum, the first human-annotated summarization dataset for controlling mixed attributes. It contains source texts from two domains, news articles and dialogues, with human-annotated summaries controlled by five designed attributes (Length, Extractiveness, Specificity, Topic, and Speaker). We propose two simple and effective parameter-efficient approaches for the new task of mixed controllable summarization based on hard prompt tuning and soft prefix tuning. Results and analysis demonstrate that hard prompt models yield the best performance on all metrics and human evaluations. However, mixed-attribute control is still challenging for summarization tasks. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/MACSum.

Nowadays, time-stamped web documents related to a general news query floods spread throughout the Internet, and timeline summarization targets concisely summarizing the evolution trajectory of events along the timeline. Unlike traditional document summarization, timeline summarization needs to model the time series information of the input events and summarize important events in chronological order. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose a Unified Timeline Summarizer (UTS) that can generate abstractive and extractive timeline summaries in time order. Concretely, in the encoder part, we propose a graph-based event encoder that relates multiple events according to their content dependency and learns a global representation of each event. In the decoder part, to ensure the chronological order of the abstractive summary, we propose to extract the feature of event-level attention in its generation process with sequential information remained and use it to simulate the evolutionary attention of the ground truth summary. The event-level attention can also be used to assist in extracting summary, where the extracted summary also comes in time sequence. We augment the previous Chinese large-scale timeline summarization dataset and collect a new English timeline dataset. Extensive experiments conducted on these datasets and on the out-of-domain Timeline 17 dataset show that UTS achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic and human evaluations.

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.

对话是人类沟通与合作的重要组成部分。现有研究主要关注一对一时尚的短对话情景。然而，现实世界中的多人互动，例如会议或访谈，经常超过几千个字。仍然缺乏相应的研究和强大的工具来了解和处理这么长的对话。因此，在这项工作中，我们为长时间对话理解和总结提供了预先培训框架。考虑到长期交谈的性质，我们提出了一种基于窗口的去噪方法，用于生成预训练。对于对话框，它损坏了一个带有对话激发灵感噪声的文本窗口，并指导模型基于剩余对话的内容来重建此窗口。此外，为了更长的输入，我们增加了稀疏关注模型，这些模型以混合方式与传统的关注相结合。我们在长对话的五个数据集进行广泛的实验，涵盖对话摘要的任务，抽象问题回答和主题分割。实验，我们表明，我们的预先训练的模型DialogLM显着超越了数据集和任务的最先进的模型。我们的GitHub存储库（HTTPS:/github.com/microsoft/dialoglm上有源代码和所有预先训练的型号。

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.

现有摘要系统主要生成纯粹依赖源文档内容的摘要。但是，即使对于人类，我们通常需要一些引用或示例，帮助我们充分了解源文档并以特定格式写入摘要。但是如何找到高质量的样式，并将它们纳入总结系统仍然挑战和探索。在本文中，我们提出了一种由致密的猎犬和摘要提升的新型检索增强的抽象概要框架。首先，检索几个密切相关的示例作为补充输入，以帮助生成模型更全面地了解文本。此外，检索的示例也可以在引导模型以捕获特定语料库的写入风格中起作用。我们在多个域和两个骨干型号的各种摘要数据集上验证我们的方法：BERT和BART。结果表明，与强大的预训练模型相比，我们的框架在胭脂-1分数中获得了1.38〜4.66的显着改善，并在账单上实现了新的最先进。人类评估表明我们的检索增强模型可以更好地捕获特定于域的书写风格。

我们展示了一个简单的无监督掩蔽目标可以在抽象多文件新闻摘要上接近受监督性能。我们的方法列举了最先进的神经摘要模型，以预测相对于多文件组的最高词汇中心的蒙面输出源文档。在对多新闻数据集的实验中，我们蒙版的培训目标会产生一个系统，优势超过无监督的方法，并且在人类评估中超越了最佳监督方法，而无需访问任何地面真实的摘要。此外，我们评估了词汇中心的不同措施，灵感来自过去的采取摘要，影响最终表现。

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。

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。

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.

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.

In long document controllable summarization, where labeled data is scarce, pretrained models struggle to adapt to the task and effectively respond to user queries. In this paper, we introduce Socratic pretraining, a question-driven, unsupervised pretraining objective specifically designed to improve controllability in summarization tasks. By training a model to generate and answer relevant questions in a given context, Socratic pretraining enables the model to more effectively adhere to user-provided queries and identify relevant content to be summarized. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through extensive experimentation on two summarization domains, short stories and dialogue, and multiple control strategies: keywords, questions, and factoid QA pairs. Our pretraining method relies only on unlabeled documents and a question generation system and outperforms pre-finetuning approaches that use additional supervised data. Furthermore, our results show that Socratic pretraining cuts task-specific labeled data requirements in half, is more faithful to user-provided queries, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on QMSum and SQuALITY.

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.

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.

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。