Novel framework for dialogue summarization based on factual-statement fusion and dialogue segmentation.

The explosive growth of dialogue data has aroused significant interest among scholars in abstractive dialogue summarization. In this paper, we propose a novel sequence-to-sequence framework called DS-SS (Dialogue Summarization with Factual-Statement Fusion and Dialogue Segmentation) for summarizing dialogues. The novelty of the DS-SS framework mainly lies in two aspects: 1) Factual statements are extracted from the source dialogue and combined with the source dialogue to perform the further dialogue encoding; and 2) A dialogue segmenter is trained and used to separate a dialogue to be encoded into several topic-coherent segments. Thanks to these two aspects, the proposed framework may better encode dialogues, thereby generating summaries exhibiting higher factual consistency and informativeness. Experimental results on two large-scale datasets SAMSum and DialogSum demonstrate the superiority of our framework over strong baselines, as evidenced by both automatic evaluation metrics and human evaluation.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2024 Zhang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)