Papers › Fair Summarization: Bridging Quality and Diversity in Extractive Summaries

Fair Summarization: Bridging Quality and Diversity in Extractive Summaries

12 Nov 2024arXiv:2411.07521archive 2025-07-28

Sina Bagheri Nezhad, Sayan Bandyapadhyay, Ameeta Agrawal

Fairness in multi-document summarization of user-generated content remains a critical challenge in natural language processing (NLP). Existing summarization methods often fail to ensure equitable representation across different social groups, leading to biased outputs. In this paper, we introduce two novel methods for fair extractive summarization: FairExtract, a clustering-based approach, and FairGPT, which leverages GPT-3.5-turbo with fairness constraints. We evaluate these methods using Divsumm summarization dataset of White-aligned, Hispanic, and African-American dialect tweets and compare them against relevant baselines. The results obtained using a comprehensive set of summarization quality metrics such as SUPERT, BLANC, SummaQA, BARTScore, and UniEval, as well as a fairness metric F, demonstrate that FairExtract and FairGPT achieve superior fairness while maintaining competitive summarization quality. Additionally, we introduce composite metrics (e.g., SUPERT+F, BLANC+F) that integrate quality and fairness into a single evaluation framework, offering a more nuanced understanding of the trade-offs between these objectives. This work highlights the importance of fairness in summarization and sets a benchmark for future research in fairness-aware NLP models.

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Tasks

DiversityDocument SummarizationExtractive SummarizationFairnessMulti-Document Summarization

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Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBLANCBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDropoutGPT-3Layer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSETSoftmaxWeight Decay

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