Improving Abstractive Summarization with Commonsense Knowledge

Abstract

Large scale pretrained models have demonstrated strong performances on several natural language generation and understanding benchmarks. However, introducing commonsense into them to generate more realistic text remains a challenge. Inspired from previous work on commonsense knowledge generation and generative commonsense reasoning, we introduce two methods to add commonsense reasoning skills and knowledge into abstractive summarization models. Both methods beat the baseline on ROUGE scores, demonstrating the superiority of our models over the baseline. Human evaluation results suggest that summaries generated by our methods are more realistic and have fewer commonsensical errors.