Papers › Topic-Aware Contrastive Learning for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization

Topic-Aware Contrastive Learning for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization

10 Sep 2021Findings (EMNLP) 2021 11arXiv:2109.04994archive 2025-07-28

Junpeng Liu, Yanyan Zou, Hainan Zhang, Hongshen Chen, Zhuoye Ding, Caixia Yuan, Xiaojie Wang

Unlike well-structured text, such as news reports and encyclopedia articles, dialogue content often comes from two or more interlocutors, exchanging information with each other. In such a scenario, the topic of a conversation can vary upon progression and the key information for a certain topic is often scattered across multiple utterances of different speakers, which poses challenges to abstractly summarize dialogues. To capture the various topic information of a conversation and outline salient facts for the captured topics, this work proposes two topic-aware contrastive learning objectives, namely coherence detection and sub-summary generation objectives, which are expected to implicitly model the topic change and handle information scattering challenges for the dialogue summarization task. The proposed contrastive objectives are framed as auxiliary tasks for the primary dialogue summarization task, united via an alternative parameter updating strategy. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed simple method significantly outperforms strong baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art performance. The code and trained models are publicly available via \href{https://github.com/Junpliu/ConDigSum}{https://github.com/Junpliu/ConDigSum}.

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Code

junpliu/condigsum officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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Tasks

Abstractive Dialogue SummarizationArticlesContrastive LearningSelf-Supervised LearningText GenerationText Summarization

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Text Summarization SAMSum ConDigSum BertScoreF1 54 #5 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Text Summarization SAMSum ConDigSum ROUGE-1 54.3 #5 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Text Summarization SAMSum ConDigSum ROUGE-2 29.3 #5 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Text Summarization SAMSum ConDigSum ROUGE-L 45.2 #5 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Text Summarization SAMSum BART-Large BertScoreF1 52.1 #8 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Text Summarization SAMSum BART-Large ROUGE-1 52.6 #8 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Text Summarization SAMSum BART-Large ROUGE-2 27 #8 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Text Summarization SAMSum BART-Large ROUGE-L 42.1 #8 of 12 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Contrastive Learning

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