We often summarize a multi-party conversation in two stages: chunking with homogeneous units and summarizing the chunks. Thus, we hypothesize that there exists a correlation between homogeneous speaker chunking and overall summarization tasks. In this work, we investigate the effectiveness of a multi-faceted approach that simultaneously produces summaries of medical concerns, doctor impressions, and an overall view. We introduce a multi-modal, multi-tasking, knowledge-infused medical dialogue summary generation (MMK-Summation) model, which is incorporated with adapter-based fine-tuning through a gated mechanism for multi-modal information integration. The model, MMK-Summation, takes dialogues as input, extracts pertinent external knowledge based on the context, integrates the knowledge and visual cues from the dialogues into the textual content, and ultimately generates concise summaries encompassing medical concerns, doctor impressions, and a comprehensive overview. The introduced model surpasses multiple baselines and traditional summarization models across all evaluation metrics (including human evaluation), which firmly demonstrates the efficacy of the knowledge-guided multi-tasking, multimodal medical conversation summarization. The code is available at https://github.com/NLP-RL/MMK-Summation.
Dialogue summarization involves a wide range of scenarios and domains. However, existing methods generally only apply to specific scenarios or domains. In this study, we propose a new pre-trained model specifically designed for multi-scenario multi-domain dialogue summarization. It adopts a multi-stage pre-training strategy to reduce the gap between the pre-training objective and fine-tuning objective. Specifically, we first conduct domain-aware pre-training using large-scale multi-scenario multi-domain dialogue data to enhance the adaptability of our pre-trained model. Then, we conduct task-oriented pre-training using large-scale multi-scenario multi-domain "dialogue-summary" parallel data annotated by ChatGPT to enhance the dialogue summarization ability of our pre-trained model. Experimental results on three dialogue summarization datasets from different scenarios and domains indicate that our pre-trained model significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art models in full fine-tuning, zero-shot, and few-shot settings.
Output length is critical to dialogue summarization systems. The dialogue summary length is determined by multiple factors, including dialogue complexity, summary objective, and personal preferences. In this work, we approach dialogue summary length from three perspectives. First, we analyze the length differences between existing models' outputs and the corresponding human references and find that summarization models tend to produce more verbose summaries due to their pretraining objectives. Second, we identify salient features for summary length prediction by comparing different model settings. Third, we experiment with a length-aware summarizer and show notable improvement on existing models if summary length can be well incorporated. Analysis and experiments are conducted on popular DialogSum and SAMSum datasets to validate our findings.
In this paper, we propose a controllable neural generation framework that can flexibly guide dialogue summarization with personal named entity planning. The conditional sequences are modulated to decide what types of information or what perspective to focus on when forming summaries to tackle the under-constrained problem in summarization tasks. This framework supports two types of use cases: (1) Comprehensive Perspective, which is a general-purpose case with no user-preference specified, considering summary points from all conversational interlocutors and all mentioned persons; (2) Focus Perspective, positioning the summary based on a user-specified personal named entity, which could be one of the interlocutors or one of the persons mentioned in the conversation. During training, we exploit occurrence planning of personal named entities and coreference information to improve temporal coherence and to minimize hallucination in neural generation. Experimental results show that our proposed framework generates fluent and factually consistent summaries under various planning controls using both objective metrics and human evaluations.