Gated Graph Neural Networks (GG-NNs) for Abstractive Multi-Comment Summarization

Summarization of long sequences into a concise statement is a core problem in natural language processing, which requires a non-trivial understanding of the weakly structured text. Therefore, integrating crowdsourced multiple users' comments into a concise summary is even harder because (1) it requires transferring the weakly structured comments to structured knowledge. Besides, (2) the users comments are informal and noisy. In order to capture the long-distance relationships in staggered long sentences, we propose a neural multi-comment summarization (MCS) system that incorporates the sentence relationships via graph heuristics that utilize relation knowledge graphs, i.e., sentence relation graphs (SRG) and approximate dis-course graphs (ADG). Motivated by the promising results of gated graph neural networks (GG- NNs) on highly structured data, we develop a GG-NNs with sequence encoder that incorporates SRG or ADG in order to capture the sentence relationships. Specifi-cally, we employ the GG- NNs on both relation knowledge graphs, with the sentence embeddings as the input node features and the graph heuristics as the edges' weights. Through multiple layer-wise propagations, the GG- NNs generate the salience for each sentence from high-level hidden sentence features. Consequently, we use a greedy heuristic to extract salient users' comments while avoiding the noise in comments. The experimental results show that the proposed MCS improves the summarization performance both quantitatively and qualitatively.