EMNLP 2021finding7 citations

Mitigating Data Scarceness through Data Synthesis, Augmentation and Curriculum for Abstractive Summarization

Ahmed Magooda, Diane Litman

Abstract

This paper explores three simple data manipulation techniques (synthesis, augmentation, curriculum) for improving abstractive summarization models without the need for any additional data. We introduce a method of data synthesis with paraphrasing, a data augmentation technique with sample mixing, and curriculum learning with two new difficulty metrics based on specificity and abstractiveness. We conduct experiments to show that these three techniques can help improve abstractive summarization across two summarization models and two different small datasets. Furthermore, we show that these techniques can improve performance when applied in isolation and when combined.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{magooda-litman-2021-mitigating-data,
    title = "Mitigating Data Scarceness through Data Synthesis, Augmentation and Curriculum for Abstractive Summarization",
    author = "Magooda, Ahmed  and
      Litman, Diane",
    editor = "Moens, Marie-Francine  and
      Huang, Xuanjing  and
      Specia, Lucia  and
      Yih, Scott Wen-tau",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.175/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.175",
    pages = "2043--2052"
}
Mitigating Data Scarceness through Data Synthesis, Augmentation and Curriculum for Abstractive Summarization · EMNLP 2021