Fact-Driven Abstractive Summarization by Utilizing Multi-Granular Multi-Relational Knowledge

Abstractive summarization generates a concise summary to capture the key ideas of the source text. This task underpins important applications like information retrieval, document comprehension, and event tracking. While much progress has been achieved, state-of-the-art summarization approaches often fail to generate high-quality summaries to reproduce factual details accurately. One of the key limitations of existing solutions is that they are primarily concerned about extracting facts from the source text but overlook other crucial factual information, such as the related time, locations, reasons, consequences, purposes, participants and involved parties. Furthermore, the current summarization frameworks are inadequate in modeling the complex semantic relations among facts and the corresponding factual information, leaving much room for improvement. This paper presents
FFSum
, a novel summarization framework for exploiting multi-grained factual information to improve text summarization. To this end,
FFSum
constructs an individual fine-grained factual graph with multiple relations among facts and the corresponding factual information. It employs a fact-driven graph attention network to integrate multi-granular factual representations at the encoding stage. It then uses a hybrid pointer network to retrieve factual pieces from the graph for the summary generation. We evaluate the
FFSum
by applying it to two real-world datasets. Experimental results show that the
FFSum
consistently outperforms a state-of-the-art approach across evaluation datasets.