Enhancing Factual Consistency of Abstractive Summarization

Abstract

Automatic abstractive summaries are found to often distort or fabricate facts in the article. This inconsistency between summary and original text has seriously impacted its applicability. We propose a fact-aware summarization model FASUM to extract and integrate factual relations into the summary generation process via graph attention. We then design a factual corrector model FC to automatically correct factual errors from summaries generated by existing systems. Empirical results1 show that the fact-aware summarization can produce abstractive summaries with higher factual consistency compared with existing systems, and the correction model improves the factual consistency of given summaries via modifying only a few keywords.