Deep reinforcement learning with distributional semantic rewards for abstractive summarization

Abstract

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been a commonly-used strategy for the abstractive summarization task to address both the exposure bias and non-differentiable task issues. However, the conventional reward ROUGE-L simply looks for exact n-grams matches between candidates and annotated references, which inevitably makes the generated sentences repetitive and incoherent. In this paper, instead of ROUGE-L, we explore the practicability of utilizing the distributional semantics to measure the matching degrees. With distributional semantics, sentence-level evaluation can be obtained, and semantically-correct phrases can also be generated without being limited to the surface form of the reference sentences. Human judgments on Gigaword and CNN/Daily Mail datasets show that our proposed distributional semantics reward (DSR) has distinct superiority in capturing the lexical and compositional diversity of natural language.