Entity-based SpanCopy for Abstractive Summarization to Improve the Factual Consistency

Abstract

Discourse-aware techniques, including entity-aware approaches, play a crucial role in summarization. In this paper, we propose an entity-based SpanCopy mechanism to tackle the entity-level factual inconsistency problem in abstractive summarization, i.e. reducing the mismatched entities between the generated summaries and the source documents. Complemented by a Global Relevance component to identify summary-worthy entities, our approach demonstrates improved factual consistency while preserving saliency on four summarization datasets, contributing to the effective application of discourse-aware methods summarization tasks.