CocoSciSum: A Scientific Summarization Toolkit with Compositional Controllability

Abstract

We present a novel toolkit for controlled summarization of scientific documents, designed for the specific needs of the scientific community. Our system generates summaries based on user preferences, adjusting key attributes specifically of length and keyword inclusion. A distinguishing feature is its ability to manage multiple attributes concurrently, demonstrating Compositional Controllability for Scientific Summarization (CocoSciSum). Benchmarked against the strong Flan-T5 baseline, CocoSciSum exhibits superior performance on both the quality of summaries generated and the control over single and multiple attributes. Moreover, CocoSciSum is a user-centric toolkit, supporting user preferences expressed in natural language instructions, and accommodating diverse input document formats. CocoSciSum is available on GitHub (https://github.com/WING-NUS/SciAssist/tree/CocoSciSum) with an introduction video (https://youtu.be/YC1YDeEjAbQ).

Publication
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Yanxia Qin
Postdoctoral Alumnus

WING alumni; former postdoc

Min-Yen Kan
Min-Yen Kan
Associate Professor

WING lead; interests include Digital Libraries, Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing.