Enhancing abstractive summarization of implicit datasets with contrastive attention

It is important for abstractive summarization models to understand the important parts of the original document and create a natural summary accordingly. Recently, studies have been conducted to incorporate important parts of the original document during learning and have shown good performance. However, these studies are effective for explicit datasets but not implicit datasets which are relatively more abstract. This study addresses the challenge of summarizing implicit datasets, which have a lower deviation in the significance of important sentences compared to explicit datasets. A multi-task learning approach that reflects information about salient and incidental objects during the learning process was proposed. This was achieved by adding a contrastive objective to the fine-tuning process of the encoder-decoder language model. The salient and incidental parts were selected based on the ROUGE-L F1 score and their relationships were learned through triplet loss. The proposed method was evaluated using five benchmark summarization datasets, including two explicit and three implicit. The experimental results showed a greater improvement in implicit datasets, particularly for the highly abstractive XSum dataset, compared to the vanilla fine-tuning method in both the BART-base and T5-small models. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2024.