Extract, Select and Rewrite: A Modular Sentence Summarization Method
Shuo Guan, Vishakh Padmakumar · 2023
A modular approach has the advantage of being compositional and controllable, comparing to most end-to-end models.In this paper we propose Extract-Select-Rewrite (ESR), a three-phase abstractive sentence summarization method.We decompose summarization into three stages: (i) knowledge extraction, where we extract relation triples from the text using off-the-shelf tools; (ii) content selection, where a subset of triples are selected; and (iii) rewriting, where the selected triple are realized into natural language.Our results demonstrates that ESR is competitive with the best end-to-end models while being more faithful.Being modular, ESR's modules can be trained on separate data which is beneficial in lowresource settings and enhancing the style controllability on text generation. 1