Improving Factual Consistency in Abstractive Summarization with Sentence Structure Pruning

Dingxin Hu, Xuanyu Zhang, Xingyue Zhang, Yiyang Li, Dongsheng Chen, Marina Litvak, Natalia Vanetik, Qing Yang, Dongliang Xu, Yanquan Zhou, Lei Li, Yuze Li, Yingqi Zhu


Abstract
State-of-the-art abstractive summarization models still suffer from the content contradiction between the summaries and the input text, which is referred to as the factual inconsistency problem. Recently, a large number of works have also been proposed to evaluate factual consistency or improve it by post-editing methods. However, these post-editing methods typically focus on replacing suspicious entities, failing to identify and modify incorrect content hidden in sentence structures. In this paper, we first verify that the correctable errors can be enriched by leveraging sentence structure pruning operation, and then we propose a post-editing method based on that. In the correction process, the pruning operation on possible errors is performed on the syntactic dependency tree with the guidance of multiple factual evaluation metrics. Experimenting on the FRANK dataset shows a great improvement in factual consistency compared with strong baselines and, when combined with them, can achieve even better performance. All the codes and data will be released on paper acceptance.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.770
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
8792–8803
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.770
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dingxin Hu, Xuanyu Zhang, Xingyue Zhang, Yiyang Li, Dongsheng Chen, Marina Litvak, Natalia Vanetik, Qing Yang, Dongliang Xu, Yanquan Zhou, Lei Li, Yuze Li, and Yingqi Zhu. 2024. Improving Factual Consistency in Abstractive Summarization with Sentence Structure Pruning. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 8792–8803, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Factual Consistency in Abstractive Summarization with Sentence Structure Pruning (Hu et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.770.pdf