A Two-Stage Long Text Summarization Method Based on Discourse Structure

Abstract

This paper proposes a two-stage automatic text summarization method based on discourse structure, aiming to improve the accuracy and coherence of the summary. In the extractive stage, a text encoder divides the long text into elementary discourse units (EDUs). Then a parse tree based on rhetorical structure theory is constructed for the whole discourse while annotating nuclearity information. The nuclearity terminal nodes are selected based on the summary length requirement, and the key EDU sequence is output. The authors use a pointer generator network and a coverage mechanism in the generation stage. The nuclearity information of EDUs is to update the word attention distribution in the pointer generator, which not only accurately reproduces the critical details of the text but also avoids self-repetition. Experiments on the standard text summarization dataset (CNN/DailyMail) show that the ROUGE score of the proposed two-stage model is better than that of the current best baseline model, and the summary achieves corresponding improvements in accuracy and coherence.