Headline-Guided Extractive Summarization for Thai News Articles

TL;DR

This paper introduces CHIMA, a novel extractive summarization model for Thai news articles that leverages headlines to improve the selection of key sentences, outperforming baseline models in multiple evaluation metrics.

Contribution

The study proposes a headline-guided extractive summarization approach for Thai texts, incorporating headline-body similarity strategies and utilizing pre-trained language models for better semantic understanding.

Findings

CHIMA outperforms baseline models on ROUGE, BLEU, and F1 scores.

Incorporating headline information improves the recall of critical sentences.

Headline-body similarity strategies enhance sentence selection flexibility.

Abstract

Text summarization is a process of condensing lengthy texts while preserving their essential information. Previous studies have predominantly focused on high-resource languages, while low-resource languages like Thai have received less attention. Furthermore, earlier extractive summarization models for Thai texts have primarily relied on the article's body, without considering the headline. This omission can result in the exclusion of key sentences from the summary. To address these limitations, we propose CHIMA, an extractive summarization model that incorporates the contextual information of the headline for Thai news articles. Our model utilizes a pre-trained language model to capture complex language semantics and assigns a probability to each sentence to be included in the summary. By leveraging the headline to guide sentence selection, CHIMA enhances the model's ability to recover important sentences and discount irrelevant ones. Additionally, we introduce two strategies for aggregating headline-body similarities, simple average and harmonic mean, providing flexibility in sentence selection to accommodate varying writing styles. Experiments on publicly available Thai news datasets demonstrate that CHIMA outperforms baseline models across ROUGE, BLEU, and F1 scores. These results highlight the effectiveness of incorporating the headline-body similarities as model guidance. The results also indicate an enhancement in the model's ability to recall critical sentences, even those scattered throughout the middle or end of the article. With this potential, headline-guided extractive summarization offers a promising approach to improve the quality and relevance of summaries for Thai news articles.