Multi-task learning for abstractive text summarization with key information guide network

Abstract Neural networks based on the attentional encoder-decoder model have good capability in abstractive text summarization. However, these models are hard to be controlled in the process of generation, which leads to a lack of key information. And some key information, such as time, place, and people, is indispensable for humans to understand the main content. In this paper, we propose a key information guide network for abstractive text summarization based on a multi-task learning framework. The core idea is to automatically extract the key information that people need most in an end-to-end way and use it to guide the generation process, so as to get a more human-compliant summary. In our model, the document is encoded into two parts: results of the normal document encoder and the key information encoding, and the key information includes the key sentences and the keywords. A multi-task learning framework is introduced to get a more sophisticated end-to-end model. To fuse the key information, we propose a novel multi-view attention guide network to obtain the dynamic representations of the source text and the key information. In addition, the dynamic representations are incorporated into the abstractive module to guide the process of summary generation. We evaluate our model on the CNN/Daily Mail dataset and experimental results show that our model leads to significant improvements.