SimCLS: A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Abstractive Summarization (ACL 2021)

Overview

SimCLS is a conceptually simple while empirically powerful framework for abstractive summarization, which can bridge the gap between the learning objective and evaluation metrics resulting from the currently dominated sequence-to-sequence learning framework by formulating text generation as a reference-free evaluation problem} (i.e., quality estimation) assisted by contrastive learning.

As shown below, SimCLS framework consists of for two stages: Candidate Generation and Reference-free evaluation, where Doc, S, Ref} represent the document, generated summary and reference respectively.

1. How to Install

Requirements

• python3
• conda create --name env --file spec-file.txt
• pip3 install -r requirements.txt
• compare_mt -> https://github.com/neulab/compare-mt

Description of Codes

• main.py -> training and evaluation procedure
• model.py -> models
• data_utils.py -> dataloader
• utils.py -> utility functions
• preprocess.py -> data preprocessing

Workspace

Following directories should be created for our experiments.

• ./cache -> storing model checkpoints
• ./result -> storing evaluation results

2. Preprocessing

We use the following datasets for our experiments.

• CNN/DailyMail -> https://github.com/abisee/cnn-dailymail
• XSum -> https://github.com/EdinburghNLP/XSum

For data preprocessing, please run

python preprocess.py --src_dir [path of the raw data] --tgt_dir [output path] --split [train/val/test] --cand_num [number of candidate summaries]

src_dir should contain the following files (using test split as an example):

• test.source
• test.source.tokenized
• test.target
• test.target.tokenized
• test.out
• test.out.tokenized

Each line of these files should contain a sample. In particular, you should put the candidate summaries for one data sample at neighboring lines in test.out and test.out.tokenized.

The preprocessing precedure will store the processed data as seperate json files in tgt_dir.

We have provided an example file in ./example.

3. How to Run

Preprocessed Data

You can download the preprocessed data for our experiments on CNNDM and XSum.

After donwloading, you should unzip the zip files in this root directory.

Hyper-parameter Setting

You may specify the hyper-parameters in main.py.

To reproduce our results, you could use the original configuration in the file, except that you should make sure that on CNNDM args.max_len=120, and on XSum args.max_len = 80.

Train

python main.py --cuda --gpuid [list of gpuid] -l

Fine-tune

python main.py --cuda --gpuid [list of gpuid] -l --model_pt [model path]

model path should be a subdirectory in the ./cache directory, e.g. cnndm/model.pt (it shouldn't contain the prefix ./cache/).

Evaluate

python main.py --cuda --gpuid [single gpu] -e --model_pt [model path]

model path should be a subdirectory in the ./cache directory, e.g. cnndm/model.pt (it shouldn't contain the prefix ./cache/).

4. Results

CNNDM

XSum

Our model outputs on these datasets can be found in ./output.

We have also provided the finetuned checkpoints on CNNDM and XSum.