English

Text Summarization with Latent Queries

Computation and Language 2021-06-02 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

The availability of large-scale datasets has driven the development of neural models that create summaries from single documents, for generic purposes. When using a summarization system, users often have specific intents with various language realizations, which, depending on the information need, can range from a single keyword to a long narrative composed of multiple questions. Existing summarization systems, however, often either fail to support or act robustly on this query focused summarization task. We introduce LaQSum, the first unified text summarization system that learns Latent Queries from documents for abstractive summarization with any existing query forms. Under a deep generative framework, our system jointly optimizes a latent query model and a conditional language model, allowing users to plug-and-play queries of any type at test time. Despite learning from only generic summarization data and requiring no further optimization for downstream summarization tasks, our system robustly outperforms strong comparison systems across summarization benchmarks with different query types, document settings, and target domains.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2106.00104,
  title  = {Text Summarization with Latent Queries},
  author = {Yumo Xu and Mirella Lapata},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.00104},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

12 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-24T02:40:57.805Z