Reinforced Abstractive Text Summarization With Semantic Added Reward

Text summarization is an important task in natural language processing (NLP). Neural summary models summarize information by understanding and rewriting documents through the encoder-decoder structure. Recent studies have sought to overcome the bias that cross-entropy-based learning methods can have through reinforcement learning (RL)-based learning methods or the problem of failing to learn optimized for metrics. However, the ROUGE metric with only <tex-math notation="LaTeX">n </tex-math> -gram matching is not a perfect solution. The purpose of this study is to improve the quality of the summary statement by proposing a reward function used in text summarization based on RL. We propose ROUGE-SIM and ROUGE-WMD, modified functions of the ROUGE function. ROUGE-SIM enables meaningfully similar words, in contrast to ROUGE-L. ROUGE-WMD is a function adding semantic similarity to ROUGE-L. The semantic similarity between articles and summary text was computed using Word Mover’s Distance (WMD) methodology. Our model with two proposed reward functions demonstrated superior performance on ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE_L than on ROUGE-L as a reward function. Our two models, ROUGE-SIM and ROUGE-WMD, scored 0.418 and 0.406 for ROUGE-L, respectively, for the Gigaword dataset. The two reward functions outperformed ROUGE-L even in the abstractiveness and grammatical aspects.