# Active Learning for Abstractive Text Summarization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.03252 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03252/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Deep Batch Active Learning by Diverse, Uncertain Gradient Lower Bounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03671/) (2019)
- [Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12840/) (2019)
- [A Discourse-Aware Attention Model for Abstractive Summarization of Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05685/) (2018)
- [SummaC: Re-Visiting NLI-based Models for Inconsistency Detection in Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09525/) (2021)
- [A Neural Attention Model for Abstractive Sentence Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00685/) (2015)
- [SummaRuNNer: A Recurrent Neural Network based Sequence Model for Extractive Summarization of Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04230/) (2016)
- [LongT5: Efficient Text-To-Text Transformer for Long Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07916/) (2021)
- [ProphetNet: Predicting Future N-gram for Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04063/) (2020)
- [WikiHow: A Large Scale Text Summarization Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09305/) (2018)
- [BRIO: Bringing Order to Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16804/) (2022)
- [Fast Abstractive Summarization with Reinforce-Selected Sentence Rewriting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11080/) (2018)
- [Better Fine-Tuning by Reducing Representational Collapse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03156/) (2020)
- [SimCLS: A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01890/) (2021)
- [Cold-start Active Learning through Self-supervised Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09535/) (2020)
- [Batch Active Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14263/) (2021)
- [Deep Active Learning for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05928/) (2017)
- [Deep Bayesian Active Learning for Natural Language Processing: Results of a Large-Scale Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05697/) (2018)
- [The Factual Inconsistency Problem in Abstractive Text Summarization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14839/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [A Survey on Deep Active Learning: Recent Advances and New Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00334/) (2024)
- [Language Model-Driven Data Pruning Enables Efficient Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04275/) (2024)
- [Active Learning for Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15040/) (2023)
- [Can We Trust the Performance Evaluation of Uncertainty Estimation Methods in Text Summarization?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17274/) (2024)
- [DUAL: Diversity and Uncertainty Active Learning for Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00867/) (2025)
- [Enhancing RAG with Active Learning on Conversation Records: Reject Incapables and Answer Capables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09073/) (2025)
- [Verb-ICL: Rethinking In-Context Learning for Structured Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04725/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Construction of human-curated annotated datasets for abstractive text summarization (ATS) is very time-consuming and expensive because creating each instance requires a human annotator to read a long document and compose a shorter summary that would preserve the key information relayed by the original document. Active Learning (AL) is a technique developed to reduce the amount of annotation required to achieve a certain level of machine learning model performance. In information extraction and text classification, AL can reduce the amount of labor up to multiple times. Despite its potential for aiding expensive annotation, as far as we know, there were no effective AL query strategies for ATS. This stems from the fact that many AL strategies rely on uncertainty estimation, while as we show in our work, uncertain instances are usually noisy, and selecting them can degrade the model performance compared to passive annotation. We address this problem by proposing the first effective query strategy for AL in ATS based on diversity principles. We show that given a certain annotation budget, using our strategy in AL annotation helps to improve the model performance in terms of ROUGE and consistency scores. Additionally, we analyze the effect of self-learning and show that it can further increase the performance of the model.