Improving Factuality of Abstractive Summarization without Sacrificing Summary Quality
Tanay Dixit, Fei Wang, Muhao Chen · 2023
Improving factual consistency of abstractive summarization has been a widely studied topic.However, most of the prior works on training factuality-aware models have ignored the negative effect it has on summary quality.We propose EFACTSUM (i.e., Effective Factual Summarization), a candidate summary generation and ranking technique to improve summary factuality without sacrificing summary quality.We show that using a contrastive learning framework with our refined candidate summaries leads to significant gains on both factuality and similarity-based metrics.Specifically, we propose a ranking strategy in which we effectively combine two metrics, thereby preventing any conflict during training.Models trained using our approach show up to 6 points of absolute improvement over the base model with respect to FactCC on XSUM and 11 points on CNN/DM, without negatively affecting either similarity-based metrics or absractiveness.1