Optimizing Multidocument Summarization by Blending Reinforcement Learning Policies

We consider extractive summarization within a cluster of related texts (multidocument summarization). Unlike single-document summarization, redundancy is particularly important because sentences across related documents might convey overlapping information. Thus, sentence extraction in such a setting is difficult because one will need to determine which pieces of information are relevant while avoiding unnecessary repetitiveness. To solve this difficult problem, we propose a novel reinforcement learning-based method Policy Blending with maximal marginal relevance and Reinforcement Learning (
PoBRL
) for solving multidocument summarization. PoBRL jointly optimizes over the following objectives necessary for a high-quality summary: importance, relevance, and length. Our strategy decouples this multiobjective optimization into different subproblems that can be solved individually by reinforcement learning. Utilizing PoBRL, we then blend each learned policies to produce a summary that is a concise and a complete representation of the original input. Our empirical analysis shows high performance on several multidocument datasets. Human evaluation also shows that our method produces high-quality output.