Align-then-abstract representation learning for low-resource summarization

Abstract

Generative transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in text summarization. Nevertheless, they still struggle in real-world scenarios with long documents when trained in low-resource settings of a few dozen labeled training instances, namely in low-resource summarization (LRS). This paper bridges the gap by addressing two key research challenges when summarizing long documents, i.e., long-input processing and document representation, in one coherent model trained for LRS. Specifically, our novel align-then-abstract representation learning model (Athena) jointly trains a segmenter and a summarizer by maximizing the alignment between the chunk-target pairs in output from the text segmentation. Extensive experiments reveal that Athena outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches in LRS on multiple long document summarization datasets from different domains.