08 Oct 2019

In our lab meeting tomorrow Nadia will present on text summarisation with pretrained encoders. Here is the title and abstract of her talk:

Towards supervised speech-to-text translation without transcription.

Abstract: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) represents the latest incarnation of pretrained language models which have recently advanced a wide range of natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we showcase how BERT can be usefully applied in text summarization and propose a general framework for both extractive and abstractive models. We introduce a novel document-level encoder based on BERT which is able to express the semantics of a document and obtain representations for its sentences. Our extractive model is built on top of this encoder by stacking several intersentence Transformer layers. For abstractive summarization, we propose a new fine-tuning schedule which adopts different optimizers for the encoder and the decoder as a means of alleviating the mismatch between the two (the former is pretrained while the latter is not). We also demonstrate that a two-staged fine-tuning approach can further boost the quality of the generated summaries. Experiments on three datasets show that our model achieves stateof-the-art results across the board in both extractive and abstractive settings.

Tuesday, October 8th, 10:30 a.m. TASC1 9408.