[AAAI2021] Unsupervised Opinion Summarization with Content Planning

This PyTorch code was used in the experiments of the research paper

Reinald Kim Amplayo, Stefanos Angelidis, and Mirella Lapata. Unsupervised Opinion Summarization with Content Planning. AAAI, 2021.

The code is cleaned post-acceptance and may run into some errors. Although I did some quick check and saw the code ran fine, please create an issue if you encounter errors and I will try to fix them as soon as possible.

We used three different datasets from three different papers: Amazon (Brazinskas et al., 2020), Rotten Tomatoes (Wang and Ling, 2016), and Yelp (Chu and Liu, 2019). For convenience, we provide the train/dev/test datasets here which are preprocessed accordingly and saved in three separate json files. A file contains a list of instances, where one instance is formatted as follows:

{
    "reviews": [
       ["this is the first review.", 5],
       ["this is the second review.", 3],
       "..."
    ],
    "summary": "this is the first summary.",
    "..."
}

In the example above, reviews is a list of review-rating tuples. For Amazon dev/test files, the summary is instead a list of reference summaries. There can be other information included in the files but are not used in the code (e.g., category and prod_id in the Amazon datasets). When using the datasets, please also cite the corresponding papers (listed below).

PlanSum follows a Condense-Abstract Framework (Amplayo and Lapata, 2019) where we first condense the reviews into encodings and then use the encodings as input to a summarization model. In PlanSum, the content plan induction model is the Condense model, while the opinion summarization model is the Abstract model. Below, we show a step-by-step procedure on how to run and generate summaries using PlanSum on the Yelp dataset.

Download the preprocessed datasets here. You can also skip steps by downloading the model files in the model/ directory and the train.plan.json files in the data/ directory.

This can be done by simply running src/train_condense.py in the form:

python src/train_condense.py -mode=train -data_type=yelp

This will create a model/ directory and a model file named condense.model. There are multiple arguments that need to be set, but the default setting is fine for Yelp. The settings used for Amazon and Rotten Tomatoes are commented in the code.

PlanSum uses a synthetic data creation method where we sample reviews from the corpus and transform them into review-summary pairs. To do this, we use the same code -mode=create, i.e.

python src/train_condense.py -mode=create -data_type=yelp

This will create a new json file named train.plan.json in the data/yelp/ directory. This is the synthetic training dataset used to train the summarization model.

This is done by simply running src/train_abstract.py:

python src/train_abstract.py -mode=train -data_type=yelp

This will create a model file named abstract.model in the model/ directory. There are also arguments here that need to be set, but the default setting is fine for Yelp. Settings used for other datasets are commented in the code.

Generating the summaries can be done by running:

python src/train_abstract.py -mode=eval -data_type=yelp

This will create an output/ directory and a file containing the summaries named predictions.txt.

This repo also include an output/ directory which includes the generated summaries from five different systems:

• gold.sol contains the gold-standard summaries
• plansum.sol contains summaries produced by PlanSum (this paper)
• denoisesum.sol contains summaries produced by DenoiseSum (Amplayo and Lapata, 2020)
• copycat.sol contains summaries produced by CopyCat (Brazinskas et al., 2020)
• bertcent.sol contains summaries produced by BertCent (this paper)

Please do rightfully cite the corresponding papers when using these outputs (e.g., by comparing them with your model's).

To cite the paper/code/data splits, please use this BibTeX:

@inproceedings{amplayo2021unsupervised,
	Author = {Amplayo, Reinald Kim and Angelidis, Stefanos and Lapata, Mirella},
	Booktitle = {AAAI},
	Year = {2021},
	Title = {Unsupervised Opinion Summarization with Content Planning},
}

If using the datasets, please also cite the original authors of the datasets:

@inproceedings{bravzinskas2020unsupervised,
	Author = {Bra{\v{z}}inskas, Arthur and Lapata, Mirella and Titov, Ivan},
	Booktitle = {ACL},
	Year = {2020},
	Title = {Unsupervised Multi-Document Opinion Summarization as Copycat-Review Generation},
}

@inproceedings{wang2016neural,
	Author = {Wang, Lu and Ling, Wang},
	Booktitle = {NAACL},
	Year = {2016},
	Title = {Neural Network-Based Abstract Generation for Opinions and Arguments},
}

@inproceedings{chu2019meansum,
	Author = {Chu, Eric and Liu, Peter},
	Booktitle = {ICML},
	Year = {2019},
	Title = {{M}ean{S}um: A Neural Model for Unsupervised Multi-Document Abstractive Summarization},
}

If there are any questions, please send me an email: reinald.kim at ed dot ac dot uk