Scientific Paper Extractive Summarization Enhanced by Citation Graphs

Abstract: In a citation graph, adjacent paper nodes share related scientific terms and topics. The graph thus conveys unique structure information of document-level relatedness that can be utilized in the paper summarization task, for exploring beyond the intra-document information. In this work, we focus on leveraging citation graphs to improve scientific paper extractive summarization under different settings. We first propose a Multi-granularity Unsupervised Summarization model (MUS) as a simple and low-cost solution to the task. MUS finetunes a pre-trained encoder model on the citation graph by link prediction tasks. Then, the abstract sentences are extracted from the corresponding paper considering multi-granularity information. Preliminary results demonstrate that citation graph is helpful even in a simple unsupervised framework. Motivated by this, we next propose a Graph-based Supervised Summarization model (GSS) to achieve more accurate results on the task when large-scale labeled data are available. Apart from employing the link prediction as an auxiliary task, GSS introduces a gated sentence encoder and a graph information fusion module to take advantage of the graph information to polish the sentence representation. Experiments on a public benchmark dataset show that MUS and GSS bring substantial improvements over the prior state-of-the-art model.