Abstractive Summarization via Discourse Relation and Graph Convolutional Networks

Abstract

Currently, the mainstream abstractive summarization method uses a machine learning model based on encoder-decoder architecture, and generally utilizes the encoder based on a recurrent neural network. The model mainly learns the serialized information of the text, but rarely learns the structured information. From the perspective of linguistics, the text structure information is effective in judging the importance of the text content. In order to enable the model to obtain text structure information, this paper proposes to use discourse relation in text summarization tasks, which can make the model focus on the important part of the text. Based on the traditional LSTM encoder, this paper adds graph convolutional networks to obtain the structural information of the text. In addition, this paper also proposes a fusion layer, which enables the model to pay attention to the serialized information of the text while acquiring the text structure information. The experimental results show that the system performance is significantly improved on ROUGE evaluation after joining discourse relation information.