Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization via Joint Learning with Single-Document Summarization

Abstract

Single-document and multi-document summarizations are very closely related in both task definition and solution method.In this work, we propose to improve neural abstractive multi-document summarization by jointly learning an abstractive single-document summarizer.We build a unified model for single-document and multi-document summarizations by fully sharing the encoder and decoder and utilizing a decoding controller to aggregate the decoder's outputs for multiple input documents.We evaluate our model on two multi-document summarization datasets: Multi-News and DUC-04.Experimental results show the efficacy of our approach, and it can substantially outperform several strong baselines.We also verify the helpfulness of single-document summarization to abstractive multi-document summarization task.