# MRCBert: A Machine Reading ComprehensionApproach for Unsupervised Summarization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.00239 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00239/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07836/) (2018)
- [Image-based Recommendations on Styles and Substitutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04757/) (2015)
- [Machine Reading Comprehension: The Role of Contextualized Language Models and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06249/) (2020)
- [Mining User Opinions in Mobile App Reviews: A Keyword-based Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04657/) (2015)
- [MeanSum: A Neural Model for Unsupervised Multi-document Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05739/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

When making an online purchase, it becomes important for the customer to read the product reviews carefully and make a decision based on that. However, reviews can be lengthy, may contain repeated, or sometimes irrelevant information that does not help in decision making. In this paper, we introduce MRCBert, a novel unsupervised method to generate summaries from product reviews. We leverage Machine Reading Comprehension, i.e. MRC, approach to extract relevant opinions and generate both rating-wise and aspect-wise summaries from reviews. Through MRCBert we show that we can obtain reasonable performance using existing models and transfer learning, which can be useful for learning under limited or low resource scenarios. We demonstrated our results on reviews of a product from the Electronics category in the Amazon Reviews dataset. Our approach is unsupervised as it does not require any domain-specific dataset, such as the product review dataset, for training or fine-tuning. Instead, we have used SQuAD v1.1 dataset only to fine-tune BERT for the MRC task. Since MRCBert does not require a task-specific dataset, it can be easily adapted and used in other domains.