Collaborative Research: RI: Medium: Expert-in-the-Loop Neural Summarization for Consequential Domains

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Automatic summarization methods aim to create shortened versions of texts (for example, news or scientific articles) that still accurately communicate their main points. Summarization methods provide a potential means to counteract the problem of “information overload” which is prevalent across many areas. But much of the research on automatic summarization has focussed largely on just one type of data: news articles. This is not because summarizing news articles is seen as particularly important. Rather, it is a result of there being conveniently available large datasets that can be used to “train” machine learning models to perform summarization. However, the resultant focus on approaches that assume a setting in which one has access to large volumes of “training data” to use to train summarization models has warped research priorities; little work has been done on investigating how automatic summarization methods might be used in important but specialized domains such as medicine or law. In these kinds of areas one is unlikely to have access to a massive dataset of manually written summaries. Furthermore, domain experts in such areas are not likely to blindly trust a system-generated summary (nor should they). This motivates a need for transparency with respect to how the model generated a particular summary, and for approaches that permit the expert to interact with the model more generally. This project aims to address these issues by investigating and extending the capabilities of modern, pre-trained, neural summarization models in the context of domains and tasks in which one has limited explicit supervision, and where there is a heightened need for factually accurate summaries. The project will involve critically evaluating state-of-the-art models when fine-tuned for summarization in domains like medicine under limited supervision; a specific aim is to characterize their behavior with respect to the factuality of model outputs. The idea is then to extend these models to permit interactive and efficient supervision, via active learning methods, alternative types of supervision (e.g., expert “highlights”), and novel pre-training objectives. Finally, the investigators will design architectures that afford increased transparency and controllability; this will be accomplished using latent variable summarization models, which will in turn allow one to inspect which input segments informed particular outputs. This will provide a natural means for the end-user (domain expert) to verify model outputs, and it will also provide a means to “debug” summarization systems. The hope is that these technical innovations will allow domain experts to benefit from automated summarization technology.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.