Diversity Augmentation of Dynamic User Preference Data for Boosting Personalized Text Summarizers

Document summarization enables efficient extraction of user-relevant content but is inherently shaped by individual subjectivity, making it challenging to identify subjective salient information in multifaceted documents. This complexity underscores the necessity for personalized summarization. However, training models for personalized summarization has so far been challenging, particularly because diverse training data containing both user preference history (i.e., click-skip trajectory) and expected (gold-reference) summaries are scarce. The MS/CAS PENS dataset is a valuable resource but includes only preference history without target summaries, preventing end-to-end supervised learning, and its limited topic-transition diversity further restricts generalization. To address this, we propose PerAugy, a novel cross-trajectory shuffling and summary-content perturbation based data augmentation technique that significantly boosts the accuracy of four state-of-the-art baseline (SOTA) user-encoders commonly used in personalized summarization frameworks (best result: 0.132uparrow w.r.t AUC). We select two such SOTA summarizer frameworks as baselines and observe that when augmented with their corresponding improved user-encoders, they consistently show an increase in personalization (avg. boost: 61.2%uparrow w.r.t. PSE-SU4 metric). As a post-hoc analysis of the role of induced diversity in the augmented dataset by peraugy, we introduce three dataset diversity metrics -- TP, RTC, and degreed to quantify the induced diversity. We find that TP and DegreeD strongly correlate with user-encoder performance on the PerAugy-generated dataset across all accuracy metrics, indicating that increased dataset diversity is a key factor driving performance gains.