A Decoding Algorithm for Length-Control Summarization Based on Directed Acyclic Transformers - ACL Anthology

A Decoding Algorithm for Length-Control Summarization Based on Directed Acyclic Transformers

Chenyang Huang, Hao Zhou, Cameron Jen, Kangjie Zheng, Osmar Zaiane, Lili Mou


Abstract
Length-control summarization aims to condense long texts into a short one within a certain length limit. Previous approaches often use autoregressive (AR) models and treat the length requirement as a soft constraint, which may not always be satisfied. In this study, we propose a novel length-control decoding algorithm based on the directed acyclic Transformer (DAT). Our approach allows for multiple plausible sequence fragments and predicts a path to connect them. In addition, we propose a Sequence Maximum a Posteriori (Seq-MAP) decoding algorithm that marginalizes different possible paths and finds the most probable summary satisfying the length budget. Our algorithm is based on beam search, which further facilitates a reranker for performance improvement. Experimental results on the Gigaword dataset demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance for length-control summarization.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.677
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11572–11583
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.677/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.677
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chenyang Huang, Hao Zhou, Cameron Jen, Kangjie Zheng, Osmar Zaiane, and Lili Mou. 2024. A Decoding Algorithm for Length-Control Summarization Based on Directed Acyclic Transformers. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 11572–11583, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Decoding Algorithm for Length-Control Summarization Based on Directed Acyclic Transformers (Huang et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.677.pdf