| Abstract: | Multi-Document Summarization of Scientific articles (MDSS) is a challenging task that aims to generate concise and informative summaries for multiple scientific articles on a particular topic. However, despite recent advances in abstractive models for MDSS, grammatical correctness and contextual coherence remain challenging issues. In this paper, we introduce EDITSum, a novel abstractive MDSS model that leverages sentence-level planning to guide summary generation. Our model incorporates neural topic model information as explicit guidance and sequential latent variables information as implicit guidance under a variational framework. We propose a hierarchical decoding strategy that generates the sentence-level planning by a sentence decoder and then generates the final summary conditioned on the planning by a word decoder. Experimental results show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art models by a significant margin on ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-L metrics. Ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the individual modules proposed in our model, and human evaluations provide strong evidence that our model generates more coherent and error-free summaries. Our work highlights the importance of high-level planning in addressing intra-sentence errors and inter-sentence incoherence issues in MDSS. |
