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Abstractive dialogue summarization requires distilling and rephrasing key information from noisy multi-speaker documents. Combining pre-trained language models with input augmentation techniques has recently led to significant research progress. However, existing solutions still struggle to select relevant chat segments, primarily relying on open-domain and unsupervised annotators not tailored to the actual needs of the summarization task. In this paper, we propose DearWatson , a task-aware utterance-level annotation framework for improving the effectiveness and interpretability of pre-trained dialogue summarization models. Precisely, we learn relevant utterances in the source document and mark them with special tags, that then act as supporting evidence for the generated summary. Quantitative experiments are conducted on two datasets made up of real-life messenger conversations. The results show that DearWatson allows model attention to focus on salient tokens, achieving new state-of-the-art results in three evaluation metrics, including semantic and factuality measures. Human evaluation proves the superiority of our solution in semantic consistency and recall. Finally, extensive ablation studies confirm each module's importance, also exploring different annotation strategies and parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large generative language models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although pretrained language models achieve high performance on various natural language processing tasks, they still require further improvements in the sentence embedding task. Many studies have improved performance in this task using pre-trained language models and contrastive learning, but these approaches are limited because they are based on naive average pooling and CLS tokens. Therefore, we propose an advanced sentence-embedding method based on weighted pooling that considers token importance. Specifically, the token importance is calculated by combining an explainable artificial-intelligence module with a text summarization model, and the final sentence embedding is derived through weighted pooling token embedding and token importance. Thus, we derive a sentence embedding that considers both the local information of the token embedding and the global information of the entire sentence. Experimental results reveal that our proposed sentence embedding outperforms other models on both text similarity tasks and text classification. Moreover, the proposed method's robustness is verified through the results of an ablation study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]