Incorporating Multi-Hypotheses as Soft-Templates in Neural Headline Generation

Abstract

Neural models are widely applied to headline generation. Template-based methods are a promising direction to overcome the shortcomings of the neural headline generation (NHG) model in generating duplicate or extra words. Previous works often retrieve relevant headlines from the training data and adopt them as the soft template to guide the NHG model. However, these works had two drawbacks: reliance on additional retrieval tools, and uncertainty regarding semantic consistency between the retrieved headline and the source article. The NHG model uncertainty can be utilized to generate hypotheses. The hypotheses generated based on a well-trained NHG model not only contain salient information but also exhibit diversity, making them suitable as soft templates. In this study, we use a basic NHG model to generate multiple diverse hypotheses as candidate templates. Then, we propose a novel Multiple-Hypotheses-based NHG (MH-NHG) model. Experiments on English headline generation tasks demonstrate that it outperforms several baseline systems and achieves a comparable performance with the state-of-the-art system. This indicates that MH-NHG can generate more accurate headlines guided by multiple hypotheses.