Exploring Human-Like Reading Strategy for Abstractive Text Summarization

The recent artificial intelligence studies have witnessed great interest in abstractive text summarization. Although remarkable progress has been made by deep neural network based methods, generating plausible and high-quality abstractive summaries remains a challenging task. The human-like reading strategy is rarely explored in abstractive text summarization, which however is able to improve the effectiveness of the summarization by considering the process of reading comprehension and logical thinking. Motivated by the human-like reading strategy that follows a hierarchical routine, we propose a novel Hybrid learning model for Abstractive Text Summarization (HATS). The model consists of three major components, a knowledge-based attention network, a multitask encoder-decoder network, and a generative adversarial network, which are consistent with the different stages of the human-like reading strategy. To verify the effectiveness of HATS, we conduct extensive experiments on two real-life datasets, CNN/Daily Mail and Gigaword datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that HATS achieves impressive results on both datasets.