Automatic text summarization has emerged as a promising solution to manage the vast amount of information available on the internet, enabling a wider audience to access it. Nevertheless, further development and experimentation with different approaches are still needed. This thesis explores the potential of combining extractive and abstractive approaches into a hybrid method, generating three types of summaries: extractive, abstractive, and hybrid. The news articles used in the study are from the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter(DN). The quality of the summaries is assessed using various automatic measures, including ROUGE, BERTScore, and Coh-Metrix. Additionally, human evaluations are conducted to compare the different types of summaries in terms of perceived fluency, adequacy, and simplicity. The results of the human evaluation show a statistically significant difference between attractive, abstractive, and hybrid summaries with regard to fluency, adequacy, and simplicity. Specifically, there is a significant difference between abstractive and hybrid summaries in terms of fluency and simplicity, but not in adequacy. The automatic measures, however, do not show significant differences between the different summaries but tend to give higher scores to the hybrid and abstractive summaries

Automatic text summarization is a long-standing task with its origins in summarizing scholarly documents by generating their abstracts. While older approaches mainly focused on generating extractive summaries, recent approaches using neural architectures have helped the task advance towards generating more abstractive, human-like summaries. Yet, the majority of the research in automatic text summarization has focused on summarizing professionally-written news articles due to easier availability of large-scale datasets with ground truth summaries in this domain. Moreover, the inverted pyramid writing style enforced in news articles places crucial information in the top sentences, essentially summarizing it. This allows for a more reliable identification of ground truth for constructing datasets. In contrast, user-generated discourse, such as social media forums or debate portals, has acquired comparably little attention, despite its evident importance. Possible reasons include the challenges posed by the informal nature of user-generated discourse, which often lacks a rigid structure, such as news articles, and the difficulty of obtaining high-quality ground truth summaries for this text register. This thesis aims to address this existing gap by delivering the following novel contributions in the form of datasets, methodologies, and evaluation strategies for automatically summarizing user-generated discourse: (1) three new datasets for the registers of social media posts and argumentative texts containing author-provided ground truth summaries as well as crowdsourced summaries for argumentative texts by adapting theoretical definitions of high-quality summaries; (2) methodologies for creating informative as well as indicative summaries for long discussions of controversial topics; (3) user-centric evaluation processes that emphasize the purpose and provenance of the summary for qualitative assessment of the summarization models; and (4) tools for facilitating the development and evaluation of summarization models that leverage visual analytics and interactive interfaces to enable a fine-grained inspection of the automatically generated summaries in relation to their source documents.:1 Introduction 1.1 Understanding User-Generated Discourse 1.2 The Role of Automatic Summarization 1.3 Research Questions and Contributions 1.4 Thesis Structure 1.5 Publication Record 2 The Task of Text Summarization 2.1 Decoding Human Summarization Practices 2.2 Exploring Automatic Summarization Methods 2.3 Evaluation of Automatic Summarization and its Challenges 2.4 Summary 3 Defining Good Summaries: Examining News Editorials 3.1 Key Characteristics of News Editorials 3.2 Operationalizing High-Quality Summaries 3.3 Evaluating and Ensuring Summary Quality 3.4 Automatic Extractive Summarization of News Editorials 3.5 Summary 4 Mining Social Media for Author-provided Summaries 4.1 Leveraging Human Signals for Summary Identification 4.2 Constructing a Corpus of Abstractive Summaries 4.3 Insights from the TL;DR Challenge 4.4 Summary 5 Generating Conclusions for Argumentative Texts 5.1 Identifying Author-provided Conclusions 5.2 Enhancing Pretrained Models with External Knowledge 5.3 Evaluating Informative Conclusion Generation 5.4 Summary 6 Frame-Oriented Extractive Summarization of Argumentative Discussions 6.1 Importance of Summaries for Argumentative Discussions 6.2 Employing Argumentation Frames as Anchor Points 6.3 Extractive Summarization of Argumentative Discussions 6.4 Evaluation of Extractive Summaries via Relevance Judgments 6.5 Summary 7 Indicative Summarization of Long Discussions 7.1 Table of Contents as an Indicative Summary 7.2 Unsupervised Summarization with Large Language Models 7.3 Comprehensive Analysis of Prompt Engineering 7.4 Purpose-driven Evaluation of Summary Usefulness 7.5 Summary 8 Summary Explorer: Visual Analytics for the Qualitative Assessment of the State of the Art in Text Summarization 8.1 Limitations of Automatic Evaluation Metrics 8.2 Designing Interfaces for Visual Exploration of Summaries 8.3 Corpora, Models, and Case Studies 8.4 Summary 9 SummaryWorkbench: Reproducible Models and Metrics for Text Summarization 9.1 Addressing the Requirements for Summarization Researchers 9.2 AUnified Interface for Applying and Evaluating State-of-the-Art Models and Metrics 9.3 Models and Measures 9.4 Curated Artifacts and Interaction Scenarios 9.5 Interaction Use Cases 9.6 Summary 10 Conclusion 10.1 Key Contributions of the Thesis 10.2 Open Problems and FutureWork

Summarization models which operate on meaning representations of documents have been neglected in the past, although they are a very promising and interesting class of methods for summarization and text understanding. In this thesis, I present one such summarizer, which uses the proposition as its meaning representation. My summarizer is an implementation of Kintsch and van Dijk's model of comprehension, which uses a tree of propositions to represent the working memory. The input document is processed incrementally in iterations. In each iteration, new propositions are connected to the tree under the principle of local coherence, and then a forgetting mechanism is applied so that only a few important propositions are retained in the tree for the next iteration. A summary can be generated using the propositions which are frequently retained. Originally, this model was only played through by hand by its inventors using human-created propositions. In this work, I turned it into a fully automatic model using current NLP technologies. First, I create propositions by obtaining and then transforming a syntactic parse. Second, I have devised algorithms to numerically evaluate alternative ways of adding a new proposition, as well as to predict necessary changes in the tree. Third, I compared different methods of modelling local coherence, including coreference resolution, distributional similarity, and lexical chains. In the first group of experiments, my summarizer realizes summary propositions by sentence extraction. These experiments show that my summarizer outperforms several state-of-the-art summarizers. The second group of experiments concerns abstractive generation from propositions, which is a collaborative project. I have investigated the option of compressing extracted sentences, but generation from propositions has been shown to provide better information packaging.

[pt] Neste trabalho, apresentamos um estudo sobre o fine-tuning de um LLM (Modelo de Linguagem Amplo ou Large Language Model) pré-treinado para a sumarização abstrativa de textos longos em português. Para isso, construímos um corpus contendo uma coleção de 7.450 artigos científicos na área de Ciências da Saúde em português. Utilizamos esse corpus para o fine-tuning do modelo BERT pré-treinado para o português brasileiro (BERTimbau). Em condições semelhantes, também treinamos um segundo modelo baseado em Memória de Longo Prazo e Recorrência (LSTM) do zero, para fins de comparação. Nossa avaliação mostrou que o modelo ajustado obteve pontuações ROUGE mais altas, superando o modelo baseado em LSTM em 30 pontos no F1-score. O fine-tuning do modelo pré-treinado também se destaca em uma avaliação qualitativa feita por avaliadores a ponto de gerar a percepção de que os resumos gerados poderiam ter sido criados por humanos em uma coleção de documentos específicos do domínio das Ciências da Saúde. / [en] In this work, we present a study on the fine-tuning of a pre-trained Large Language Model for abstractive summarization of long texts in Portuguese. To do so, we built a corpus gathering a collection of 7,450 public Health Sciences papers in Portuguese. We fine-tuned a pre-trained BERT model for Brazilian Portuguese (the BERTimbau) with this corpus. In a similar condition, we also trained a second model based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) from scratch for comparison purposes. Our evaluation showed that the fine-tuned model achieved higher ROUGE scores, outperforming the LSTM based by 30 points for F1-score. The fine-tuning of the pre-trained model also stands out in a qualitative evaluation performed by assessors, to the point of generating the perception that the generated summaries could have been created by humans in a specific collection of documents in the Health Sciences domain.

Cette thèse présente le résultat de plusieurs années de recherche dans le domaine de la génération automatique de résumés. Trois contributions majeures, présentées sous la forme d'articles publiés ou soumis pour publication, en forment le coeur. Elles retracent un cheminement qui part des méthodes par extraction en résumé jusqu'aux méthodes par abstraction. L'expérience HexTac, sujet du premier article, a d'abord été menée pour évaluer le niveau de performance des êtres humains dans la rédaction de résumés par extraction de phrases. Les résultats montrent un écart important entre la performance humaine sous la contrainte d'extraire des phrases du texte source par rapport à la rédaction de résumés sans contrainte. Cette limite à la rédaction de résumés par extraction de phrases, observée empiriquement, démontre l'intérêt de développer d'autres approches automatiques pour le résumé. Nous avons ensuite développé un premier système selon l'approche Fully Abstractive Summarization, qui se situe dans la catégorie des approches semi-extractives, comme la compression de phrases et la fusion de phrases. Le développement et l'évaluation du système, décrits dans le second article, ont permis de constater le grand défi de générer un résumé facile à lire sans faire de l'extraction de phrases. Dans cette approche, le niveau de compréhension du contenu du texte source demeure insuffisant pour guider le processus de sélection du contenu pour le résumé, comme dans les approches par extraction de phrases. Enfin, l'approche par abstraction basée sur des connaissances nommée K-BABS est proposée dans un troisième article. Un repérage des éléments d'information pertinents est effectué, menant directement à la génération de phrases pour le résumé. Cette approche a été implémentée dans le système ABSUM, qui produit des résumés très courts mais riches en contenu. Ils ont été évalués selon les standards d'aujourd'hui et cette évaluation montre que des résumés hybrides formés à la fois de la sortie d'ABSUM et de phrases extraites ont un contenu informatif significativement plus élevé qu'un système provenant de l'état de l'art en extraction de phrases. / This Ph.D. thesis is the result of several years of research on automatic text summarization. Three major contributions are presented in the form of published and submitted papers. They follow a path that moves away from extractive summarization and toward abstractive summarization. The first article describes the HexTac experiment, which was conducted to evaluate the performance of humans summarizing text by extracting sentences. Results show a wide gap of performance between human summaries written by sentence extraction and those written without restriction. This empirical performance ceiling to sentence extraction demonstrates the need for new approaches to text summarization. We then developed and implemented a system, which is the subject of the second article, using the Fully Abstractive Summarization approach. Though the name suggests otherwise, this approach is better categorized as semi-extractive, along with sentence compression and sentence fusion. Building and evaluating this system brought to light the great challenge associated with generating easily readable summaries without extracting sentences. In this approach, text understanding is not deep enough to provide help in the content selection process, as is the case in extractive summarization. As the third contribution, a knowledge-based approach to abstractive summarization called K-BABS was proposed. Relevant content is identified by pattern matching on an analysis of the source text, and rules are applied to directly generate sentences for the summary. This approach is implemented in a system called ABSUM, which generates very short and content-rich summaries. An evaluation was performed according to today's standards. The evaluation shows that hybrid summaries generated by adding extracted sentences to ABSUM's output have significantly more content than a state-of-the-art extractive summarizer.

Cette thèse présente le résultat de plusieurs années de recherche dans le domaine de la génération automatique de résumés. Trois contributions majeures, présentées sous la forme d'articles publiés ou soumis pour publication, en forment le coeur. Elles retracent un cheminement qui part des méthodes par extraction en résumé jusqu'aux méthodes par abstraction. L'expérience HexTac, sujet du premier article, a d'abord été menée pour évaluer le niveau de performance des êtres humains dans la rédaction de résumés par extraction de phrases. Les résultats montrent un écart important entre la performance humaine sous la contrainte d'extraire des phrases du texte source par rapport à la rédaction de résumés sans contrainte. Cette limite à la rédaction de résumés par extraction de phrases, observée empiriquement, démontre l'intérêt de développer d'autres approches automatiques pour le résumé. Nous avons ensuite développé un premier système selon l'approche Fully Abstractive Summarization, qui se situe dans la catégorie des approches semi-extractives, comme la compression de phrases et la fusion de phrases. Le développement et l'évaluation du système, décrits dans le second article, ont permis de constater le grand défi de générer un résumé facile à lire sans faire de l'extraction de phrases. Dans cette approche, le niveau de compréhension du contenu du texte source demeure insuffisant pour guider le processus de sélection du contenu pour le résumé, comme dans les approches par extraction de phrases. Enfin, l'approche par abstraction basée sur des connaissances nommée K-BABS est proposée dans un troisième article. Un repérage des éléments d'information pertinents est effectué, menant directement à la génération de phrases pour le résumé. Cette approche a été implémentée dans le système ABSUM, qui produit des résumés très courts mais riches en contenu. Ils ont été évalués selon les standards d'aujourd'hui et cette évaluation montre que des résumés hybrides formés à la fois de la sortie d'ABSUM et de phrases extraites ont un contenu informatif significativement plus élevé qu'un système provenant de l'état de l'art en extraction de phrases. / This Ph.D. thesis is the result of several years of research on automatic text summarization. Three major contributions are presented in the form of published and submitted papers. They follow a path that moves away from extractive summarization and toward abstractive summarization. The first article describes the HexTac experiment, which was conducted to evaluate the performance of humans summarizing text by extracting sentences. Results show a wide gap of performance between human summaries written by sentence extraction and those written without restriction. This empirical performance ceiling to sentence extraction demonstrates the need for new approaches to text summarization. We then developed and implemented a system, which is the subject of the second article, using the Fully Abstractive Summarization approach. Though the name suggests otherwise, this approach is better categorized as semi-extractive, along with sentence compression and sentence fusion. Building and evaluating this system brought to light the great challenge associated with generating easily readable summaries without extracting sentences. In this approach, text understanding is not deep enough to provide help in the content selection process, as is the case in extractive summarization. As the third contribution, a knowledge-based approach to abstractive summarization called K-BABS was proposed. Relevant content is identified by pattern matching on an analysis of the source text, and rules are applied to directly generate sentences for the summary. This approach is implemented in a system called ABSUM, which generates very short and content-rich summaries. An evaluation was performed according to today's standards. The evaluation shows that hybrid summaries generated by adding extracted sentences to ABSUM's output have significantly more content than a state-of-the-art extractive summarizer.

The amount of data available and consumed by people globally is growing. To reduce mental fatigue and increase the general ability to gain insight into complex texts or documents, we have developed an application to aid in this task. The application allows users to upload documents and ask domain-specific questions about them using our web application. A summarized version of each document is presented to the user, which could further facilitate their understanding of the document and guide them towards what types of questions could be relevant to ask. Our application allows users flexibility with the types of documents that can be processed, it is publicly available, stores no user data, and uses state-of-the-art models for its summaries and answers. The result is an application that yields near human-level intuition for answering questions in certain isolated cases, such as Wikipedia and news articles, as well as some scientific texts. The application shows a decrease in reliability and its prediction as to the complexity of the subject, the number of words in the document, and grammatical inconsistency in the questions increases. These are all aspects that can be improved further if used in production. / Mängden data som är tillgänglig och konsumeras av människor växer globalt. För att minska den mentala trötthet och öka den allmänna förmågan att få insikt i komplexa, massiva texter eller dokument, har vi utvecklat en applikation för att bistå i de uppgifterna. Applikationen tillåter användare att ladda upp dokument och fråga kontextspecifika frågor via vår webbapplikation. En sammanfattad version av varje dokument presenteras till användaren, vilket kan ytterligare förenkla förståelsen av ett dokument och vägleda dem mot vad som kan vara relevanta frågor att ställa. Vår applikation ger användare möjligheten att behandla olika typer av dokument, är tillgänglig för alla, sparar ingen personlig data, och använder de senaste modellerna inom språkbehandling för dess sammanfattningar och svar. Resultatet är en applikation som når en nära mänsklig intuition för vissa domäner och frågor, som exempelvis Wikipedia- och nyhetsartiklar, samt viss vetensaplig text. Noterade undantag för tillämpningen härrör från ämnets komplexitet, grammatiska korrekthet för frågorna och dokumentets längd. Dessa är områden som kan förbättras ytterligare om den används i produktionen.

Diagnostic Captioning is described as “the automatic generation of a diagnostic text from a set of medical images of a patient collected during an examination” [59] and it can assist inexperienced doctors and radiologists to reduce clinical errors or help experienced professionals increase their productivity. In this context, tools that would help medical doctors produce higher quality reports in less time could be of high interest for medical imaging departments, as well as significantly impact deep learning research within the biomedical domain, which makes it particularly interesting for people involved in industry and researchers all along. In this work, we attempted to develop Diagnostic Captioning systems, based on novel Deep Learning approaches, to investigate to what extent Neural Networks are capable of performing medical image tagging, as well as automatically generating a diagnostic text from a set of medical images. Towards this objective, the first step is concept detection, which boils down to predicting the relevant tags for X-RAY images, whereas the ultimate goal is caption generation. To this end, we further participated in ImageCLEFmedical 2022 evaluation campaign, addressing both the concept detection and the caption prediction tasks by developing baselines based on Deep Neural Networks; including image encoders, classifiers and text generators; in order to get a quantitative measure of my proposed architectures’ performance [28]. My contribution to the evaluation campaign, as part of this work and on behalf of NeuralDynamicsLab¹ group at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, within the school of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, ranked 4th in the former and 5th in the latter task [55, 68] among 12 groups included within the top-10 best performing submissions in both tasks. / Diagnostisk textning avser automatisk generering från en diagnostisk text från en uppsättning medicinska bilder av en patient som samlats in under en undersökning och den kan hjälpa oerfarna läkare och radiologer, minska kliniska fel eller hjälpa erfarna yrkesmän att producera diagnostiska rapporter snabbare [59]. Därför kan verktyg som skulle hjälpa läkare och radiologer att producera rapporter av högre kvalitet på kortare tid vara av stort intresse för medicinska bildbehandlingsavdelningar, såväl som leda till inverkan på forskning om djupinlärning, vilket gör den domänen särskilt intressant för personer som är involverade i den biomedicinska industrin och djupinlärningsforskare. I detta arbete var mitt huvudmål att utveckla system för diagnostisk textning, med hjälp av nya tillvägagångssätt som används inom djupinlärning, för att undersöka i vilken utsträckning automatisk generering av en diagnostisk text från en uppsättning medi-cinska bilder är möjlig. Mot detta mål är det första steget konceptdetektering som går ut på att förutsäga relevanta taggar för röntgenbilder, medan slutmålet är bildtextgenerering. Jag deltog i ImageCLEF Medical 2022-utvärderingskampanjen, där jag deltog med att ta itu med både konceptdetektering och bildtextförutsägelse för att få ett kvantitativt mått på prestandan för mina föreslagna arkitekturer [28]. Mitt bidrag, där jag representerade forskargruppen NeuralDynamicsLab² , där jag arbetade som ledande forskningsingenjör, placerade sig på 4:e plats i den förra och 5:e i den senare uppgiften [55, 68] bland 12 grupper som ingår bland de 10 bästa bidragen i båda uppgifterna.