EASE: Extractive-Abstractive Summarization End-to-End using the Information Bottleneck Principle
Haoran Li, Arash Einolghozati, Srinivasan V. Iyer, Bhargavi Paranjape, Yashar Mehdad, Sonal Gupta, Marjan Ghazvininejad · 2021
Current abstractive summarization systems outperform their extractive counterparts, but their widespread adoption is inhibited by the inherent lack of interpretability.Extractive summarization systems, though interpretable, suffer from redundancy and possible lack of coherence.To achieve the best of both worlds, we propose EASE, an extractive-abstractive framework that generates concise abstractive summaries that can be traced back to an extractive summary.Our framework can be applied to any evidence-based text generation problem and can accommodate various pretrained models in its simple architecture.We use the Information Bottleneck principle to jointly train the extraction and abstraction in an end-to-end fashion.Inspired by previous research that humans use a two-stage framework to summarize long documents (Jing and McKeown, 2000), our framework first extracts a pre-defined amount of evidence spans and then generates a summary using only the evidence.Using automatic and human evaluations, we show that the generated summaries are better than strong extractive and extractiveabstractive baselines. * Equal contribution.Source Document: (CNN)Mike Rowe is coming to a river near you."Sometimes, you hear about a person who makes you feel good about humanity, but bad about yourself," Rowe says.On Thursday's episode of "Somebody's Gotta Do It," Rowe meets up with Chad Pregracke, the founder of Living Lands & Waters, who does just that.Pregracke wants to clean up the nation's rivers one piece of detritus at a time.His quota?Always "more."Read Mike Rowe's Facebook post on how to break our litter habit.Since he founded the nonprofit in 1998 at the ripe age of 23, Pregracke and more than 87,000 volunteers have collected 8.4 million pounds of trash from U.S. waterways.Those efforts helped him earn the 2013 CNN Hero of the Year Award, along with numerous other honors."Wherever you are, no matter if there's a stream, a creek, a lake, whatever, that needs to be cleaned up, you can do it.Just organize it and do it," he told CNN's Anderson Cooper after his win.Pregracke also gives Rowe a tour of the 150-foot, solar-powered barge that the Living Lands & Waters staff calls home during lengthy cleanups.The part-home, part-office, part-dumpster has seven bedrooms, two bathrooms, a classroom and a kitchen -and just happens to be made from a recycled strip club.According to the organization's latest annual report, Pregracke has made it his mission in 2015 to remove 500,000 more pounds of trash.If you'd like to help achieve this goal, visit his website to learn how to help: LivingLandsAndWaters.org/Get-Involved/.Summary: Mike Rowe meets Chad Pregracke, the founder of Living Lands & Waters.The nonprofit has collected 8.4 million pounds of trash from U.S. waterways.Pregracke was named the 2013 CNN Hero of the Year.