Text Summarization and Question Generation Models

自然语言处理是信息时代最重要的技术之一。理解复杂的语言话语也是人工智能的关键部分。NLP的应用无处不在，因为人们几乎所有的东西都用语言交流：网络搜索、新闻、广告、电子邮件、客户服务、语言翻译、放射报告、社交媒体、虚拟助手、对话系统(聊天机器人)、博客、产品评论等。我打算继续关注我之前调查过的领域的问题，即文本摘要和问题生成领域。我感兴趣的是建立这样的系统：一方面从文档中收集、合成和抽象信息内容，另一方面捕获用户的需求、意图和偏好，并生成定制的、个性化的文档。文本摘要和问题生成是解决信息过载和信息疲劳问题的研究方向。这将带来丰富的信息利用和高效决策的理论、技术和工具。在这个建议中，我计划研究以下目标：短期内(1)开发具有结构和推理的稳健表征学习，(2)建立稳健的抽象文本摘要模型，(3)设计全面的问题生成模型，并构建自动生成答案不可知问题、探究性问题和多跳问题的模型，(4)研究文本摘要和问题生成之间的互补性，长期而言(1)捕获用户的需求，并根据用户的需求和意图对摘要进行剪裁，(2)从信息性摘要向推理性摘要转变；(3)设计智能机制处理自然语言(即推理、合成、要点、浓缩和总结信息)以及连贯和定制的信息传递机制。这项研究方案涉及如何结合文本摘要和问题生成技术来形成真正有用的信息传递工具。我计划开发模型、技术和工具，向用户提供与接收信息的用户相关和适当的信息，他们可以很容易地吸收这些信息，使他们能够执行任务，通常能够更好和更有效地进行决策。这些工具可用于监控、过滤、提取、抽象和检测大量文本数据中的特定/相关信息和证据，从而为最终用户节省时间。这项工作需要一些对此感兴趣的本科生和研究生在不同阶段参与，并将有几项研究贡献。这些成果将改进最先进的文本摘要和问题生成模式，并将在同行评议的会议和期刊中传播。

Natural language processing (NLP) is one of the most important technologies of the information age. Understanding complex language utterances is also a crucial part of artificial intelligence. Applications of NLP are everywhere because people communicate mostly everything in language: web searches, news, advertisements, emails, customer services, language translations, radiology reports, social media, virtual assistants, conversational systems (chatbots), blogs, product comments, etc. I intend to continue to focus on problems in the areas that I have previously investigated, namely in the areas of text summarization, and question generation. I am interested in building up systems that on the one hand gist, synthesize, and abstract information content from documents, and on the other hand capture user needs, intents, and preferences and generate customized, personalized documents. Text summarization and question generation are research directions for solving the information overload and the information fatigue problems. This will result in theories, technologies, and tools leading to rich information use and efficient decision-making.  In this proposal, I plan to study the following objectives: in a short-term (1) developing robust representation learning with structure and reasoning, (2) building robust abstractive text summarization models, (3) devising comprehensive question generation models, and constructing models that generate automatically answer-agnostic questions, inquisitive questions, and multiHop questions, (4) studying the complementarity between text summarization and question generation, and in a long-term (1) capturing users' needs and tailoring the summaries as answers to user needs and intents, (2) shifting from the informative summarization to the inferential summarization, and (3) designing intelligent mechanisms to process natural language (i.e., inference, synthesize, gist, condense and summarize information) as well as mechanisms for coherent and tailored information delivery. This research proposal deals with ways of combining text summarization and question generation technologies to form truly useful information delivery tools. I am planning to develop models, technologies and tools to deliver to users information that is relevant and appropriate for the users receiving it, information that they can easily assimilate to enable them to perform their tasks, usually enabling better and more efficient decision-making. These tools can be used to monitor, filter, extract, abstract, and detect specific/relevant information and evidence in large amount of textual data, hence, saving time to the end-user. The work requires the involvement of a number of interested undergraduate and graduate students at different stages, and will have several research contributions. The results will improve the state-of-the-art text summarization and question generation models and will be disseminated in peer-reviewed conferences and journals.