# Faithful to the Original: Fact Aware Neural Abstractive Summarization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.04434 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04434/

## Key facts

- Cited by 141 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Nov 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 141)

- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [What Makes Good In-Context Examples for GPT-3?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06804/) (2021)
- [QMSum: A New Benchmark for Query-based Multi-domain Meeting Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05938/) (2021)
- [Trusting Your Evidence: Hallucinate Less with Context-aware Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14739/) (2023)
- [AlignScore: Evaluating Factual Consistency with a Unified Alignment Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16739/) (2023)
- [Understanding Factuality in Abstractive Summarization with FRANK: A Benchmark for Factuality Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13346/) (2021)
- [Towards a Unified Multi-Dimensional Evaluator for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07197/) (2022)
- [Factuality Enhanced Language Models for Open-Ended Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04624/) (2022)
- [On Hallucination and Predictive Uncertainty in Conditional Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15025/) (2021)
- [Large Legal Fictions: Profiling Legal Hallucinations in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01301/) (2024)
- [Q2: Evaluating Factual Consistency in Knowledge-Grounded Dialogues via Question Generation and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08202/) (2021)
- [Annotating and Modeling Fine-grained Factuality in Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04302/) (2021)
- [CLIFF: Contrastive Learning for Improving Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09209/) (2021)
- [Entity-level Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09130/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Process-Oriented Automatic Text Summarization with Exploration of LLM-Based Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02901/) (2024)
- [Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Large Language Models Through News Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08412/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Human-Language Model Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09746/) (2022)
- [TrueTeacher: Learning Factual Consistency Evaluation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11171/) (2023)
- [The Factual Inconsistency Problem in Abstractive Text Summarization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14839/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Attribution in Dialogue Systems: The BEGIN Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00071/) (2021)
- [Increasing Faithfulness in Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue with Controllable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06963/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Survey on Long Document Summarization: Datasets, Models and Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00939/) (2022)
- [Compression, Transduction, and Creation: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06379/) (2021)
- [Improving Factual Consistency of Abstractive Summarization via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04623/) (2021)
- [FactKB: Generalizable Factuality Evaluation using Language Models Enhanced with Factual Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08281/) (2023)
- [Faithful or Extractive? On Mitigating the Faithfulness-Abstractiveness Trade-off in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13684/) (2021)
- [Detecting and Mitigating Hallucinations in Multilingual Summarisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13632/) (2023)
- [DreamStory: Open-Domain Story Visualization by LLM-Guided Multi-Subject Consistent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12899/) (2024)
- [CONFIT: Toward Faithful Dialogue Summarization with Linguistically-Informed Contrastive Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08713/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unlike extractive summarization, abstractive summarization has to fuse different parts of the source text, which inclines to create fake facts. Our preliminary study reveals nearly 30% of the outputs from a state-of-the-art neural summarization system suffer from this problem. While previous abstractive summarization approaches usually focus on the improvement of informativeness, we argue that faithfulness is also a vital prerequisite for a practical abstractive summarization system. To avoid generating fake facts in a summary, we leverage open information extraction and dependency parse technologies to extract actual fact descriptions from the source text. The dual-attention sequence-to-sequence framework is then proposed to force the generation conditioned on both the source text and the extracted fact descriptions. Experiments on the Gigaword benchmark dataset demonstrate that our model can greatly reduce fake summaries by 80%. Notably, the fact descriptions also bring significant improvement on informativeness since they often condense the meaning of the source text.