A Method of Integrating Length Constraints into Encoder-Decoder Transformer for Abstractive Text Summarization

Text summarization aims to generate a concise version of the original text.The longer the summary text is,themore detailed it will be fromthe original text,and this depends on the intended use.Therefore,the problem of generating summary texts with desired lengths is a vital task to put the research into practice.To solve this problem,in this paper,we propose a new method to integrate the desired length of the summarized text into the encoder-decoder model for the abstractive text summarization problem.This length parameter is integrated into the encoding phase at each self-attention step and the decoding process by preserving the remaining length for calculating headattention in the generation process and using it as length embeddings added to theword embeddings.We conducted experiments for the proposed model on the two data sets,Cable News Network(CNN)Daily and NEWSROOM,with different desired output lengths.The obtained results show the proposed model’s effectiveness compared with related studies.