View Dialogue in 2D: A Two-stream Model in Time-speaker Perspective for Dialogue Summarization and beyond

Abstract

Existing works on dialogue summarization often follow the common practice in document summarization and view the dialogue, which comprises utterances of different speakers, as a single utterance stream ordered by time. However, this single-stream approach without specific attention to the speaker-centered points has limitations in fully understanding the dialogue. To better capture the dialogue information, we propose a 2D view of dialogue based on a time-speaker perspective, where the time and speaker streams of dialogue can be obtained as strengthened input. Based on this 2D view, we present an effective two-stream model called ATM to combine the two streams. Extensive experiments on various summarization datasets demonstrate that ATM significantly surpasses other models regarding diverse metrics and beats the state-of-the-art models on the QMSum dataset in ROUGE scores. Besides, ATM achieves great improvements in summary faithfulness and human evaluation. Moreover, results on machine reading comprehension datasets show the generalization ability of the proposed methods and shed light on other dialogue-based tasks. Our code will be publicly available online.