Topic-controllable summarization is an emerging research area with a wide range of potential applications. However, existing approaches suffer from significant limitations. For example, the majority of existing methods built upon recurrent architectures, which can significantly limit their performance compared to more recent Transformer-based architectures, while they also require modifications to the model’s architecture for controlling the topic. At the same time, there is currently no established evaluation metric designed specifically for topic-controllable summarization. This work proposes a new topic-oriented evaluation measure to automatically evaluate the generated summaries based on the topic affinity between the generated summary and the desired topic. The reliability of the proposed measure is demonstrated through appropriately designed human evaluation. In addition, we adapt topic embeddings to work with powerful Transformer architectures and propose a novel and efficient approach for guiding the summary generation through control tokens. Experimental results reveal that control tokens can achieve better performance compared to more complicated embedding-based approaches while also being significantly faster.

Disfluency detection is a critical task in real-time dialogue systems. However, despite its importance, it remains a relatively unexplored field, mainly due to the lack of appropriate datasets. At the same time, existing datasets suffer from various issues, including class imbalance issues, which can significantly affect the performance of the model on rare classes, as it is demonstrated in this paper. To this end, we propose LARD, a method for generating complex and realistic artificial disfluencies with little effort. The proposed method can handle three of the most common types of disfluencies: repetitions, replacements, and restarts. In addition, we release a new large-scale dataset with disfluencies that can be used on four different tasks: disfluency detection, classification, extraction, and correction. Experimental results on the LARD dataset demonstrate that the data produced by the proposed method can be effectively used for detecting and removing disfluencies, while also addressing limitations of existing datasets.

Recent Deep Learning (DL) summarization models greatly outperform traditional summarization methodologies, generating high-quality summaries. Despite their success, there are still important open issues, such as the limited engagement and trust of users in the whole process. In order to overcome these issues, we reconsider the task of summarization from a human-centered perspective. We propose to integrate a user interface with an underlying DL model, instead of tackling summarization as an isolated task from the end user. We present a novel system, where the user can actively participate in the whole summarization process. We also enable the user to gather insights into the causative factors that drive the model’s behavior, exploiting the self-attention mechanism. We focus on the financial domain, in order to demonstrate the efficiency of generic DL models for domain-specific applications. Our work takes a first step towards a model-interface co-design approach, where DL models evolve along user needs, paving the way towards human-computer text summarization interfaces.