A large majority of American adults get at least some of their news from the Internet. Even though many online news products have the goal of informing their users about the news, they lack scalable and reliable tools for measuring how well they are achieving this goal, and therefore have to resort to noisy proxy metrics (e.g., clickthrough rates or reading time) to track their performance.As a first step towards measuring news informedness at a scale, we study the problem of quiz-style multiple-choice question generation, which may be used to survey users about their knowledge of recent news. In particular, we formulate the problem as two sequence-to-sequence tasks: question-answer generation (QAG) and distractor, or incorrect answer, generation (DG). We introduce NewsQuizQA, the first dataset intended for quiz-style questionanswer generation, containing 20K human written question-answer pairs from 5K news article summaries. Using this dataset, we propose a series of novel techniques for applying large pre-trained Transformer encoder-decoder models, namely PEGASUS and T5, to the tasks of question-answer generation and distractor generation.We show that our models outperform strong baselines using both automated metrics and human raters. We provide a case study of running weekly quizzes on real-world users via the Google Surveys platform over the course of two months. We found that users generally found the automatically generated questions to be educational and enjoyable. Finally, to serve the research community, we are releasing the NewsQuizQA dataset.
Recent years have witnessed a widespread increase of rumor news generated by humans and machines. Therefore, tools for investigating rumor news have become an urgent necessity. One useful function of such tools is to see ways a specific topic or event is represented by presenting different points of view from multiple sources. In this paper, we propose Maester, a novel agreementaware search framework for investigating rumor news. Given an investigative question, Maester will retrieve related articles to that question, assign and display top articles from agree, disagree, and discuss categories to users. Splitting the results into these three categories provides the user a holistic view towards the investigative question. We build Maester based on the following two key observations: (1) relatedness can commonly be determined by keywords and entities occurring in both questions and articles, and (2) the level of agreement between the investigative question and the related news article can often be decided by a few key sentences. Accordingly, we use gradient boosting tree models with keyword/entity matching features for relatedness detection, and leverage recurrent neural network to infer the level of agreement. Our experiments on the Fake News Challenge (FNC) dataset demonstrate up to an order of magnitude improvement of Maester over the original FNC winning solution, for agreement-aware search.
We aim to renew interest in a particular multidocument summarization (MDS) task which we call AgreeSum: agreement-oriented multidocument summarization. Given a cluster of articles, the goal is to provide abstractive summaries that represent information common and faithful to all input articles. Given the lack of existing datasets, we create a dataset for AgreeSum, and provide annotations on article-summary entailment relations for a subset of the clusters in the dataset. We aim to create strong baselines for the task by applying the top-performing pretrained singledocument summarization model PEGASUS onto AgreeSum, leveraging both annotated clusters by supervised losses, and unannotated clusters by T5-based entailment-related and language-related losses. Compared to other baselines, both automatic evaluation and human evaluation show better article-summary and cluster-summary entailment in generated summaries. On a separate note, we hope that our article-summary entailment annotations contribute to the community's effort in improving abstractive summarization faithfulness.
We aim to renew interest in a particular multidocument summarization (MDS) task which we call AgreeSum: agreement-oriented multidocument summarization. Given a cluster of articles, the goal is to provide abstractive summaries that represent information common and faithful to all input articles. Given the lack of existing datasets, we create a dataset for AgreeSum, and provide annotations on article-summary entailment relations for a subset of the clusters in the dataset. We aim to create strong baselines for the task by applying the top-performing pretrained singledocument summarization model PEGASUS onto AgreeSum, leveraging both annotated clusters by supervised losses, and unannotated clusters by T5-based entailment-related and language-related losses. Compared to other baselines, both automatic evaluation and human evaluation show better article-summary and cluster-summary entailment in generated summaries. On a separate note, we hope that our article-summary entailment annotations contribute to the community's effort in improving abstractive summarization faithfulness.
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