{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/using-question-answering-rewards-to-improve","title":"Using Question Answering Rewards to Improve Abstractive Summarization","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2021-11-01","proceeding":"Findings (EMNLP) 2021 11","authors":["Chulaka Gunasekara","Guy Feigenblat","Benjamin Sznajder","Ranit Aharonov","Sachindra Joshi"],"abstract":"Neural abstractive summarization models have drastically improved in the recent years. However, the summaries generated by these models generally suffer from issues such as: not capturing the critical facts in source documents, and containing facts that are inconsistent with the source documents. In this work, we present a general framework to train abstractive summarization models to alleviate such issues. We first train a sequence-to-sequence model to summarize documents, and then further train this model in a Reinforcement Learning setting with question-answering based rewards. We evaluate the summaries generated by the this framework using multiple automatic measures and human judgements. The experimental results show that the question-answering rewards can be used as a general framework to improve neural abstractive summarization. Particularly, the results from human evaluations show that the summaries generated by our approach is preferred over 30% of the time over the summaries generated by general abstractive summarization models.","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.47","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.47.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"using-question-answering-rewards-to-improve","repo_url":"https://github.com/anhtu-phan/qa-rewards-abstractive-summarization","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"abstractive-text-summarization","task_name":"Abstractive Text Summarization"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}