We carry out experiments with deep learning models of summarization across the domains of news, personal stories, meetings, and medical articles in order to understand how content selection is performed. We find that many sophisticated features of state of the art extractive summarizers do not improve performance over simpler models. These results suggest that it is easier to create a summarizer for a new domain than previous work suggests and bring into question the benefit of deep learning models for summarization for those domains that do have massive datasets (i.e., news). At the same time, they suggest important questions for new research in summarization; namely, new forms of sentence representations or external knowledge sources are needed that are better suited to the summarization task.

During crises such as natural disasters or other human tragedies, information needs of both civilians and responders often require urgent, specialized treatment. Monitoring and summarizing a text stream during such an event remains a difficult problem. We present a system for update summarization which predicts the salience of sentences with respect to an event and then uses these predictions to directly bias a clustering algorithm for sentence selection, increasing the quality of the updates. We use novel, disaster-specific features for salience prediction, including geo-locations and language models representing the language of disaster. Our evaluation on a standard set of retrospective events using ROUGE shows that salience prediction provides a significant improvement over other approaches.

Despite the success of style transfer in image processing, it has seen limited progress in natural language generation. Part of the problem is that content is not as easily decoupled from style in the text domain. Curiously, in the field of stylometry, content does not figure prominently in practical methods of discriminating stylistic elements, such as authorship and genre. Rather, syntax and function words are the most salient features. Drawing on this work, we model style as a suite of low-level linguistic controls, such as frequency of pronouns, prepositions, and subordinate clause constructions. We train a neural encoder-decoder model to reconstruct reference sentences given only content words and the setting of the controls. We perform style transfer by keeping the content words fixed while adjusting the controls to be indicative of another style. In experiments, we show that the model reliably responds to the linguistic controls and perform both automatic and manual evaluations on style transfer. We find we can fool a style classifier 84% of the time, and that our model produces highly diverse and stylistically distinctive outputs. This work introduces a formal, extendable model of style that can add control to any neural text generation system.

Deep neural networks (DNN) are quickly becoming the de facto standard modeling method for many natural language generation (NLG) tasks. In order for such models to truly be useful, they must be capable of correctly generating utterances for novel meaning representations (MRs) at test time. In practice, even sophisticated DNNs with various forms of semantic control frequently fail to generate utterances faithful to the input MR. In this paper, we propose an architecture agnostic selftraining method to sample novel MR/text utterance pairs to augment the original training data. Remarkably, after training on the augmented data, even simple encoder-decoder models with greedy decoding are capable of generating semantically correct utterances that are as good as state-of-the-art outputs in both automatic and human evaluations of quality.

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