Exploring the Incorporation of Opinion Polarity for Abstractive Multi-document Summarisation

Abstract

Abstractive multi-document summarisation (MDS) remains a challenging task. Part of the problem is the question as to how to preserve a document’s polarity in the summary. We propose an opinion polarity attention model for MDS, which incorporates a polarity estimator based on a BERT-GRU sentiment analysis network. It captures the impact of opinions expressed in the source documents and integrates it in the attention mechanism. Experimental results using a state-of-the-art MDS approach and a common benchmark test collection demonstrate that this model has a measurable positive effect using a range of metrics.