# Improving the Faithfulness of Abstractive Summarization via Entity Coverage Control

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.02263 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02263/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00661/) (2020)
- [CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/) (2019)
- [Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07082/) (2020)
- [Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12840/) (2019)
- [Text Summarization with Pretrained Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08345/) (2019)
- [SAMSum Corpus: A Human-annotated Dialogue Dataset for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12237/) (2019)
- [A Discourse-Aware Attention Model for Abstractive Summarization of Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05685/) (2018)
- [Asking and Answering Questions to Evaluate the Factual Consistency of Summaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04228/) (2020)
- [FEQA: A Question Answering Evaluation Framework for Faithfulness Assessment in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03754/) (2020)
- [ScispaCy: Fast and Robust Models for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07669/) (2019)
- [Neural Text Summarization: A Critical Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08960/) (2019)
- [Graph-Bert: Only Attention is Needed for Learning Graph Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05140/) (2020)
- [Faithful to the Original: Fact Aware Neural Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04434/) (2017)
- [Annotating and Modeling Fine-grained Factuality in Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04302/) (2021)
- [Entity-level Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09130/) (2021)
- [Controllable Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05217/) (2017)
- [CTRLsum: Towards Generic Controllable Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04281/) (2020)
- [Improving Faithfulness in Abstractive Summarization with Contrast Candidate Generation and Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09061/) (2021)
- [Improving Zero and Few-Shot Abstractive Summarization with Intermediate Fine-tuning and Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12836/) (2020)
- [Language Model as an Annotator: Exploring DialoGPT for Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12544/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Extractive Summarization via ChatGPT for Faithful Summary Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04193/) (2023)
- [SummIt: Iterative Text Summarization via ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14835/) (2023)
- [A Systematic Survey of Text Summarization: From Statistical Methods to Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11289/) (2024)
- [On Improving Summarization Factual Consistency from Natural Language Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09968/) (2022)
- [Faithfulness-Aware Decoding Strategies for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03278/) (2023)
- [HEGEL: Hypergraph Transformer for Long Document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04126/) (2022)
- [DiffuSum: Generation Enhanced Extractive Summarization with Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01735/) (2023)
- [Improved Beam Search for Hallucination Mitigation in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02712/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Hierarchical Discourse Graph for Scientific Document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00177/) (2023)
- [Revisiting the Architectures like Pointer Networks to Efficiently Improve the Next Word Distribution, Summarization Factuality, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12289/) (2023)
- [Neural Natural Language Processing for Long Texts: A Survey on Classification and Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16259/) (2023)
- [ETF: An Entity Tracing Framework for Hallucination Detection in Code Summaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14748/) (2024)
- [SCOPE: A Self-supervised Framework for Improving Faithfulness in Conditional Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13674/) (2025)
- [Generating Faithful Text From a Knowledge Graph with Noisy Reference Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06488/) (2023)
- [Towards Enhancing Coherence in Extractive Summarization: Dataset and Experiments with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04855/) (2024)
- [PROM: A Phrase-level Copying Mechanism with Pre-training for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06647/) (2023)
- [CARE: A Conformal Safety Layer for Medical Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08969/) (2026)
- [Unveiling the Magic: Investigating Attention Distillation in Retrieval-augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11794/) (2024)
- [T3: A Novel Zero-shot Transfer Learning Framework Iteratively Training on an Assistant Task for a Target Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17640/) (2024)
- [Evaluation of Faithfulness Using the Longest Supported Subsequence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12157/) (2023)
- [FormosanBench: Benchmarking Low-Resource Austronesian Languages in the Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21563/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Abstractive summarization systems leveraging pre-training language models have achieved superior results on benchmark datasets. However, such models have been shown to be more prone to hallucinate facts that are unfaithful to the input context. In this paper, we propose a method to remedy entity-level extrinsic hallucinations with Entity Coverage Control (ECC). We first compute entity coverage precision and prepend the corresponding control code for each training example, which implicitly guides the model to recognize faithfulness contents in the training phase. We further extend our method via intermediate fine-tuning on large but noisy data extracted from Wikipedia to unlock zero-shot summarization. We show that the proposed method leads to more faithful and salient abstractive summarization in supervised fine-tuning and zero-shot settings according to our experimental results on three benchmark datasets XSum, Pubmed, and SAMSum of very different domains and styles.