Entity-based SpanCopy for Abstractive Summarization to Improve the Factual Consistency (2209.03479v1)

Abstract: Despite the success of recent abstractive summarizers on automatic evaluation metrics, the generated summaries still present factual inconsistencies with the source document. In this paper, we focus on entity-level factual inconsistency, i.e. reducing the mismatched entities between the generated summaries and the source documents. We therefore propose a novel entity-based SpanCopy mechanism, and explore its extension with a Global Relevance component. Experiment results on four summarization datasets show that SpanCopy can effectively improve the entity-level factual consistency with essentially no change in the word-level and entity-level saliency. The code is available at https://github.com/Wendy-Xiao/Entity-based-SpanCopy