Dilated convolution for enhanced extractive summarization: A GAN-based approach with BERT word embedding

Abstract

Text summarization (TS) plays a crucial role in natural language processing (NLP) by automatically condensing and capturing key information from text documents. Its significance extends to diverse fields, including engineering, healthcare, and others, where it offers substantial time and resource savings. However, manual summarization is a laborious task, prompting the need for automated text summarization systems. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy for extractive summarization that leverages a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based method and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) word embedding. BERT, a transformer-based architecture, processes sentence bidirectionally, considering both preceding and following words. This contextual understanding empowers BERT to generate word representations that carry a deeper meaning and accurately reflect their usage within specific contexts. Our method adopts a generator and discriminator within the GAN framework. The generator assesses the likelihood of each sentence in the summary while the discriminator evaluates the generated summary. To extract meaningful features in parallel, we introduce three dilated convolution layers in the generator and discriminator. Dilated convolution allows for capturing a larger context and incorporating long-range dependencies. By introducing gaps between filter weights, dilated convolution expands the receptive field, enabling the model to consider a broader context of words. To encourage the generator to explore diverse sentence combinations that lead to high-quality summaries, we introduce various noises to each document within our proposed GAN. This approach allows the generator to learn from a range of sentence permutations and select the most suitable ones. We evaluate the performance of our proposed model using the CNN/Daily Mail dataset. The results, measured using the ROUGE metric, demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to other tested methods. This confirms the effectiveness of our GAN-based strategy, which integrates dilated convolution layers, BERT word embedding, and a generator-discriminator framework in achieving enhanced extractive summarization performance.