Very large language models such as GPT-3 have shown impressive performance across a wide variety of tasks, including text summarization. In this paper, we show that this strong performance extends to opinion summarization. We explore several pipeline methods for applying GPT-3 to summarize a large collection of user reviews in a zero-shot fashion, notably approaches based on recursive summarization and selecting salient content to summarize through supervised clustering or extraction. On two datasets, an aspect-oriented summarization dataset of hotel reviews and a generic summarization dataset of Amazon and Yelp reviews, we show that the GPT-3 models achieve very strong performance in human evaluation. We argue that standard evaluation metrics do not reflect this, and evaluate against several new measures targeting faithfulness, factuality, and genericity to contrast these different methods.

A typical product or place often has hundreds of reviews, and summarization of these texts is an important and challenging problem. Recent progress on abstractive summarization in domains such as news has been driven by supervised systems trained on hundreds of thousands of news articles paired with human-written summaries. However for opinion texts, such large scale datasets are rarely available. Unsupervised methods, self-training, and few-shot learning approaches bridge that gap. In this work, we present a novel self-training approach, OpineSum, for abstractive opinion summarization. The summaries in this approach are built using a novel application of textual entailment and capture the consensus of opinions across the various reviews for an item. This method can be used to obtain silver-standard summaries on a large scale and train both unsupervised and few-shot abstractive summarization systems. OpineSum achieves state-of-the-art performance in both settings.

GPT-3等模型的零和少量提示的最新成功导致了NLP研究的范式转移。在本文中，我们研究了其对文本摘要的影响，重点是新闻摘要的经典基准领域。首先，我们研究了零击GPT-3与在大型摘要数据集中训练的微调模型的比较。我们表明，不仅人类压倒性地更喜欢GPT-3摘要，而且这些摘要也不遭受普通数据集特异性问题（例如事实差的问题）。接下来，我们研究这对评估意味着什么，尤其是黄金标准测试集的作用。我们的实验表明，基于参考和无参考的自动指标，例如最近提出的基于质量检查或基于质量的事实方法无法可靠地评估零击摘要。最后，我们讨论了未来的研究挑战，除了通用摘要之外，特别是基于关键字和方面的摘要，表明了优势微调方法与零拍的提示相比如何。为了支持进一步的研究，我们发布：（a）在4个标准摘要基准中，从微调和零摄像模型中产生的10K生成的摘要，（b）1K人类偏好判断和比较不同系统的普通系统，以进行通用和关键字的不同系统。基于摘要。

A primary objective of news articles is to establish the factual record for an event, frequently achieved by conveying both the details of the specified event (i.e., the 5 Ws; Who, What, Where, When and Why regarding the event) and how people reacted to it (i.e., reported statements). However, existing work on news summarization almost exclusively focuses on the event details. In this work, we propose the novel task of summarizing the reactions of different speakers, as expressed by their reported statements, to a given event. To this end, we create a new multi-document summarization benchmark, SUMREN, comprising 745 summaries of reported statements from various public figures obtained from 633 news articles discussing 132 events. We propose an automatic silver training data generation approach for our task, which helps smaller models like BART achieve GPT-3 level performance on this task. Finally, we introduce a pipeline-based framework for summarizing reported speech, which we empirically show to generate summaries that are more abstractive and factual than baseline query-focused summarization approaches.

意见摘要是创建摘要的任务，以获取用户评论中的流行意见。在本文中，我们介绍了Geodesic Summarizer（GeoSumm），这是一种新型系统，可执行无监督的提取意见摘要。 GeoSumm涉及基于编码器的表示模型，该模型将文本表示为潜在语义单元的分布。 GeoSumm通过在多个解码器层上对预训练的文本表示进行字典学习来生成这些表示。然后，我们使用这些表示形式使用新型的基于测量距离的评分机制来量化审查句子的相关性。我们使用相关得分来确定流行意见，以构成一般和特定方面的摘要。我们提出的模型GeoSumm在三个意见摘要数据集上实现了最先进的性能。我们执行其他实验来分析模型的功能，并展示跨不同域{\ x}的概括能力。

The majority of available text summarization datasets include short-form source documents that lack long-range causal and temporal dependencies, and often contain strong layout and stylistic biases. While relevant, such datasets will offer limited challenges for future generations of text summarization systems. We address these issues by introducing BookSum, a collection of datasets for long-form narrative summarization. Our dataset covers source documents from the literature domain, such as novels, plays and stories, and includes highly abstractive, human written summaries on three levels of granularity of increasing difficulty: paragraph-, chapter-, and book-level. The domain and structure of our dataset poses a unique set of challenges for summarization systems, which include: processing very long documents, non-trivial causal and temporal dependencies, and rich discourse structures. To facilitate future work, we trained and evaluated multiple extractive and abstractive summarization models as baselines for our dataset.

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。

Language models (LMs) now excel at many tasks such as few-shot learning, question answering, reasoning, and dialog. However, they sometimes generate unsupported or misleading content. A user cannot easily determine whether their outputs are trustworthy or not, because most LMs do not have any built-in mechanism for attribution to external evidence. To enable attribution while still preserving all the powerful advantages of recent generation models, we propose RARR (Retrofit Attribution using Research and Revision), a system that 1) automatically finds attribution for the output of any text generation model and 2) post-edits the output to fix unsupported content while preserving the original output as much as possible. When applied to the output of several state-of-the-art LMs on a diverse set of generation tasks, we find that RARR significantly improves attribution while otherwise preserving the original input to a much greater degree than previously explored edit models. Furthermore, the implementation of RARR requires only a handful of training examples, a large language model, and standard web search.

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。

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.

Recent work pre-training Transformers with self-supervised objectives on large text corpora has shown great success when fine-tuned on downstream NLP tasks including text summarization. However, pre-training objectives tailored for abstractive text summarization have not been explored. Furthermore there is a lack of systematic evaluation across diverse domains. In this work, we propose pre-training large Transformer-based encoder-decoder models on massive text corpora with a new selfsupervised objective. In PEGASUS, important sentences are removed/masked from an input document and are generated together as one output sequence from the remaining sentences, similar to an extractive summary. We evaluated our best PEGASUS model on 12 downstream summarization tasks spanning news, science, stories, instructions, emails, patents, and legislative bills. Experiments demonstrate it achieves state-of-the-art performance on all 12 downstream datasets measured by ROUGE scores. Our model also shows surprising performance on low-resource summarization, surpassing previous state-of-the-art results on 6 datasets with only 1000 examples. Finally we validated our results using human evaluation and show that our model summaries achieve human performance on multiple datasets.

文本AutoEncoders的最新进展显着提高了潜在空间的质量，这使得模型能够从聚合的潜伏向量生成语法和一致的文本。作为此属性的成功应用程序，无监督的意见摘要模型通过解码输入的聚合潜伏向量来生成摘要。更具体地，它们通过简单的平均值执行聚合。然而，关于矢量聚合步骤如何影响生成质量的知之甚少。在这项研究中，我们通过检查潜在空间和生成的摘要来重新审视常用的简单平均方法。我们发现，由于汇总潜在向量中的意外$ L_2 $ -NORM收缩，我们将倾向于从简单的潜在潜在的潜在潜伏的潜伏向量产生过度通用的摘要。为了克服这个问题，我们开发了一个框架COOP，它使用输入输出字重叠搜索潜在向量聚合的输入组合。实验结果表明，COC成功减轻了摘要载体退化问题，并在两个意见摘要基准上建立了新的最先进的表现。代码可用于\ url {https://github.com/megagonlabs/coop}。

Recent work in large language modeling (LLMs) has used fine-tuning to align outputs with the preferences of a prototypical user. This work assumes that human preferences are static and homogeneous across individuals, so that aligning to a a single "generic" user will confer more general alignment. Here, we embrace the heterogeneity of human preferences to consider a different challenge: how might a machine help people with diverse views find agreement? We fine-tune a 70 billion parameter LLM to generate statements that maximize the expected approval for a group of people with potentially diverse opinions. Human participants provide written opinions on thousands of questions touching on moral and political issues (e.g., "should we raise taxes on the rich?"), and rate the LLM's generated candidate consensus statements for agreement and quality. A reward model is then trained to predict individual preferences, enabling it to quantify and rank consensus statements in terms of their appeal to the overall group, defined according to different aggregation (social welfare) functions. The model produces consensus statements that are preferred by human users over those from prompted LLMs (>70%) and significantly outperforms a tight fine-tuned baseline that lacks the final ranking step. Further, our best model's consensus statements are preferred over the best human-generated opinions (>65%). We find that when we silently constructed consensus statements from only a subset of group members, those who were excluded were more likely to dissent, revealing the sensitivity of the consensus to individual contributions. These results highlight the potential to use LLMs to help groups of humans align their values with one another.

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。

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.

我们介绍了微博观点摘要（MOS）的任务，并共享3100个金标准意见摘要的数据集，以促进该领域的研究。该数据集包含跨越2年期的推文的摘要，并且涵盖了比任何其他公共Twitter摘要数据集更多的主题。摘要本质上是抽象的，是由熟练的记者创建的，这些记者在将事实信息（主要故事）与作者观点分开的模板之后，总结了新闻文章。我们的方法不同于以前在社交媒体中生成金标准摘要的工作，这些摘要通常涉及选择代表性帖子，从而有利于提取性摘要模型。为了展示数据集的实用性和挑战，我们基准了一系列抽象性和提取性的最先进的摘要模型，并实现良好的性能，前者的表现优于后者。我们还表明，微调对于提高性能和研究使用不同样本量的好处是必要的。

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.

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

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。

Natural Language Generation (NLG) has improved exponentially in recent years thanks to the development of sequence-to-sequence deep learning technologies such as Transformer-based language models. This advancement has led to more fluent and coherent NLG, leading to improved development in downstream tasks such as abstractive summarization, dialogue generation and data-to-text generation. However, it is also apparent that deep learning based generation is prone to hallucinate unintended text, which degrades the system performance and fails to meet user expectations in many real-world scenarios. To address this issue, many studies have been presented in measuring and mitigating hallucinated texts, but these have never been reviewed in a comprehensive manner before. In this survey, we thus provide a broad overview of the research progress and challenges in the hallucination problem in NLG. The survey is organized into two parts: (1) a general overview of metrics, mitigation methods, and future directions; and (2) an overview of task-specific research progress on hallucinations in the following downstream tasks, namely abstractive summarization, dialogue generation, generative question answering, data-to-text generation, machine translation, and visual-language generation. This survey serves to facilitate collaborative efforts among researchers in tackling the challenge of hallucinated texts in NLG.