Leveraging Key Information Modeling to Improve Less-Data Constrained News Headline Generation via Duality Fine-Tuning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a duality fine-tuning approach for news headline generation that effectively leverages limited data by modeling key information, improving informativeness and readability.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel duality fine-tuning method that captures key information and connects prediction tasks, enhancing less-data constrained headline generation.

Findings

Improved performance on language modeling metrics

Enhanced informativeness and correctness of headlines

Effective across different pre-trained models

Abstract

Recent language generative models are mostly trained on large-scale datasets, while in some real scenarios, the training datasets are often expensive to obtain and would be small-scale. In this paper we investigate the challenging task of less-data constrained generation, especially when the generated news headlines are short yet expected by readers to keep readable and informative simultaneously. We highlight the key information modeling task and propose a novel duality fine-tuning method by formally defining the probabilistic duality constraints between key information prediction and headline generation tasks. The proposed method can capture more information from limited data, build connections between separate tasks, and is suitable for less-data constrained generation tasks. Furthermore, the method can leverage various pre-trained generative regimes, e.g., autoregressive and encoder-decoder models. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that our method is effective and efficient to achieve improved performance in terms of language modeling metric and informativeness correctness metric on two public datasets.