Probing of Quantitative Values in Abstractive Summarization Models

Abstract: Abstractive text summarization has recently become a popular approach, but data hallucination remains a serious problem, including with quantitative data. We propose a set of probing tests to evaluate the efficacy of abstract summarization models' modeling of quantitative values found in the input text. Our results show that in most cases, the encoders of recent SOTA-performing models struggle to provide embeddings that adequately represent quantitative values in the input compared to baselines, and in particular, they outperform random representations in some, but surprisingly not all, cases. Under our assumptions, this suggests that the encoder's performance contributes to the quantity hallucination problem. One model type in particular, DistilBART-CDM, was observed to underperform randomly initialized representations for several experiments, and performance versus BERT suggests that standard pretraining and fine-tuning approaches for the summarization task may play a role in underperformance for some encoders.