Papers › Sentence Centrality Revisited for Unsupervised Summarization

Sentence Centrality Revisited for Unsupervised Summarization

8 Jun 2019ACL 2019 7arXiv:1906.03508archive 2025-07-28

Hao Zheng, Mirella Lapata

Single document summarization has enjoyed renewed interests in recent years thanks to the popularity of neural network models and the availability of large-scale datasets. In this paper we develop an unsupervised approach arguing that it is unrealistic to expect large-scale and high-quality training data to be available or created for different types of summaries, domains, or languages. We revisit a popular graph-based ranking algorithm and modify how node (aka sentence) centrality is computed in two ways: (a)~we employ BERT, a state-of-the-art neural representation learning model to better capture sentential meaning and (b)~we build graphs with directed edges arguing that the contribution of any two nodes to their respective centrality is influenced by their relative position in a document. Experimental results on three news summarization datasets representative of different languages and writing styles show that our approach outperforms strong baselines by a wide margin.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

mswellhao/PacSum officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Document SummarizationNews SummarizationRepresentation LearningSentenceUnsupervised Extractive Summarization

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections