How can you use transformers for summarizing text?
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Transformers are a powerful type of neural network that can learn from sequential data, such as text, speech, or images. They have been used to achieve state-of-the-art results in various natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation, text classification, and question answering. One of the most interesting applications of transformers is text summarization, which is the task of generating a concise and relevant summary of a longer text. In this article, you will learn how you can use transformers for summarizing text, and what are the benefits and challenges of this approach.
Transformers are a type of neural network that can process sequential data without relying on recurrent or convolutional layers. Instead, they use a mechanism called attention, which allows them to focus on the most relevant parts of the input and the output at each step. Attention also enables transformers to capture long-range dependencies and contextual information, which are essential for natural language understanding. Transformers consist of two main components: an encoder and a decoder. The encoder takes the input text and converts it into a sequence of hidden representations, called embeddings. The decoder takes the embeddings and generates the output text, one token at a time.
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Umaid Asim
CEO at SensViz | Building human-centric AI applications that truly understands and empowers you | Helping businesses and individuals leverage AI | Entrepreneur | Top AI & Data Science Voice
Transformers are a type of machine learning model that's good at handling sequences of data, like sentences. Think of them as smart machines that can read a whole paragraph and understand the gist. They don't just look at words one by one, but they can see how words relate to each other in a sentence, which is cool because it helps them get the bigger picture. They are especially handy when you want to summarize text. It's like, instead of reading a whole book, a transformer helps you get the key points without spending hours on it. And the best part? Many transformers are already trained and ready to use, so you can get straight to summarizing without a lot of technical setup.
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Ritwik Joshi 🤖
Tech Advisor | TEDx Speaker | IIMA | ex Co-Founder of Botosynthesis | AI and Robotics Aficionado | Entrepreneurship, Storytelling, Startup Consulting
Transformers are like wrapped neural networks which are comprised of two core elements: an encoder that transforms input and a decoder responsible for producing output text. They have a huge implementation in NLU use cases.
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Diego Gosmar
Transformers improved the previous models, which were mostly based on RRN (Recurring Neural Network) and LSTM next (Long Short-Term Memory) to build language models and address many complex operations, like translation, summarizing and much more. Two enhancements introduced by Transformer are the parallel computation over the text without disrupting the order, and with the possibility to handle very long text sequences, without compromising the performances. In a nutshell, this means of lot of scalability.
To summarize text with transformers, you need to train them on a large corpus of text-summary pairs, such as news articles and headlines, or scientific papers and abstracts. The training objective is to minimize the difference between the generated summary and the reference summary, using a loss function such as cross-entropy. During inference, you feed the text you want to summarize to the encoder, and then use the decoder to generate the summary, either by sampling or by choosing the most likely token at each step. You can also use a technique called beam search, which keeps track of several possible summaries and selects the best one based on a scoring function.
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Santiago Valdarrama
I tell stories about technology and teach hard-core Machine Learning at ml.school.
Here are the steps you can follow: Step 1 - Start with a pretrained model. Some options are BERT or GPT-3. These models were trained with a lot of data, and they have a great understanding of language. Step 2 - Create a dataset containing pairs of original text and its summary. You'll need to tokenize this data before using it. Step 3 - Using the dataset, you can fine-tune the pretrained model. This will teach the model how to do summarization. Step 4 - Start using the model to summarize your test data and use metrics like ROUGE or BLEU to evaluate the results. Step 5 - At this point, you can go back to improve the model. Some ideas: find more data, improve the quality of the data you have, or fine-tune for more iterations.
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Umaid Asim
CEO at SensViz | Building human-centric AI applications that truly understands and empowers you | Helping businesses and individuals leverage AI | Entrepreneur | Top AI & Data Science Voice
Transformers scan through lines of text, spotting key pieces of information. When tasked with summarizing, they first read the text to understand the main ideas and relevant details. Unlike us, they don't get tired, making them a reliable choice for scanning loads of text. They employ techniques like attention mechanisms, which help them focus on important parts while skimming through the rest. Once they gather the essentials, they craft a shorter version, much like how we’d summarize a long article for a friend. The beauty is, they do this quickly and accurately, making them a handy tool when you need a quick summary without missing out on crucial info.
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Ritwik Joshi 🤖
Tech Advisor | TEDx Speaker | IIMA | ex Co-Founder of Botosynthesis | AI and Robotics Aficionado | Entrepreneurship, Storytelling, Startup Consulting
Transformers revolutionise text summarisation by using a "self-attention" mechanism, which dynamically assesses the significance of words in input text to create contextually accurate and coherent summaries. This adaptable approach is a game-changer for natural language processing, promising exciting possibilities in the field.
Transformers have several advantages over other methods for summarizing text, such as extractive summarization or rule-based summarization. First, transformers can generate abstractive summaries, which means they can paraphrase, rephrase, or condense the original text, rather than just selecting or copying parts of it. This can result in more coherent and informative summaries, especially for long or complex texts. Second, transformers can learn from large and diverse datasets, which can improve their generalization and robustness to different domains and genres. Third, transformers can leverage pre-trained models, such as BERT or GPT-3, which have been trained on massive amounts of text and can encode rich semantic and syntactic knowledge. This can reduce the amount of data and computation required to fine-tune them for summarizing text.
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Vaibhav Kulshrestha
Lead AI Engineer @ Slytek, Inc. | AI | Robotics | DevOps
- They can generate concise and coherent summaries rather than relying solely on extraction. - To illustrate, consider a lengthy news article about a recent scientific breakthrough. - With a transformer model, you can generate a summary that captures the essence of the article in a more human-friendly manner. - Additionally, transformers' capacity to learn from extensive and diverse datasets enhances their adaptability to different domains and genres. - Moreover, their utilization of pre-trained models like #BERT or #GPT3, which encode rich semantic and syntactic knowledge, reduces the need for extensive fine-tuning, making the summarization process more efficient and robust. #Transformers #TextSummarization #NLP #AI
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Jesus Hijas
Linkedin Top Voice Entrepreneurship | Human-centric Tech Business Advisor | Author | Creative Entrepreneur | Always-learning type of Mentor & Facilitator | Linkedin Creator
* Transformers excel at capturing the context of a text and abstracting the key messages. * Parallel processing and attention / self-attention mechanisms allow them to successfully summarize longer texts vs predecessory neural networks that acted more sequentially. * Pre-training Transformers can bring speed and scale to summarizing long texts universally. * Fine-tunning these models for specific niches or disciplines can make them even more eficient for specific purposes.
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Israel Olaniyan
International Development Expert || Strategy Consultant || Project Management || Solving the world's most challenging problems at the intersection of systems strengthening, sustainability, and public policy
The use of transformers for text summarization brings several advantages. These models excel at capturing semantic understanding, context, and relevance within the input text, enabling the generation of summaries that preserve the essential information. Additionally, transformers can handle longer texts efficiently, making them suitable for summarizing lengthy documents or articles.
Transformers have achieved impressive performance when it comes to summarizing text, but they still face some limitations and difficulties. One major challenge is ensuring the quality and reliability of the generated summaries. This can be impacted by factors such as length, relevance, and coherence. With length, transformers may produce summaries that are too long or too short, or that omit or repeat important information. Relevance is determined by how well the summary captures the main points and essence of the original text; however, transformers may generate summaries that are irrelevant, inaccurate, or misleading. Lastly, coherence refers to how well the summary flows and connects different sentences and ideas; however, transformers may generate summaries that are incoherent, inconsistent, or illogical. Finding the optimal length and ensuring quality and reliability of generated summaries is not trivial.
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Yashwant (Sai) R.
Director - Machine Learning @ Fidelity Investments | AI Product Leader | Generative AI | High ROI AI
The biggest challenge of using transformers for summarizing text is aligning the output with human behavior and ethical values. While transformers can generate summaries that might look good on statistical metrics like ROUGE or BLEU, they may not always produce a summary that is representative of the original text or that aligns with human values. This is because transformers are trained on large datasets and may not have the same level of understanding or empathy as a human. In addition, the output of transformer based summary may not always be socially unbiased or positive in nature, which can be a concerning for business.
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Vaibhav Kulshrestha
Lead AI Engineer @ Slytek, Inc. | AI | Robotics | DevOps
Ensuring the quality and reliability of generated summaries remains a hurdle. Transformers may struggle with determining the ideal length, leading to overly lengthy or overly summaries that might miss crucial information. Additionally, issues of relevance arise, where generated summaries can be inaccurate or off-topic. Lastly, coherence is a concern, as transformers can sometimes produce summaries that lack flow and logical structure. Balancing these factors to obtain optimal summaries is an ongoing quest. To illustrate, consider a news article: a transformer may generate an overly lengthy summary, lacking in relevance, or failing to connect key points, underscoring the challenges in text summarization. #Transformers #TextSummarization
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Rashmi N.
Machine Learning at Cactus
I agree that the quality and reliability of the generated summaries is one of the major challenges faced by transformers while summarizing text, coupled with the length and reliability of it. However, in my opinion, I think data/algorithmic bias, handling ambiguity, and optimal hyperparameter tuning are other major challenges for summarization via transformers.
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To evaluate transformers for summarizing text, you need to use both automatic and human methods, as each one has its strengths and weaknesses. Automatic methods are based on comparing the generated summary with one or more reference summaries, using metrics such as ROUGE, BLEU, or BERTScore. These metrics measure the overlap or similarity between the summaries, based on different levels of granularity, such as words, n-grams, or embeddings. However, automatic metrics cannot capture the nuances and subtleties of natural language, such as style, tone, or sentiment, and they may not reflect the actual quality or usefulness of the summary. Human methods are based on asking human evaluators to rate or rank the generated summary according to criteria such as content, fluency, readability, or informativeness. These methods can provide more reliable and comprehensive feedback, but they are also more costly, time-consuming, and subjective.
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Israel Olaniyan
International Development Expert || Strategy Consultant || Project Management || Solving the world's most challenging problems at the intersection of systems strengthening, sustainability, and public policy
Evaluating the effectiveness of transformers in summarizing text involves assessing the quality of generated summaries in comparison to reference summaries or gold standards. Common metrics for evaluation include ROUGE (Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation) scores, which measure the overlap between the generated summary and the reference summaries based on n-gram overlap and other similarity measures.
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Vaibhav Kulshrestha
Lead AI Engineer @ Slytek, Inc. | AI | Robotics | DevOps
- Consider a news article about a breakthrough in medical research. - Using transformers, you can distill the key findings, significance, and implications into a succinct summary. - This capability not only saves time but also aids in information retrieval and comprehension. - However, evaluating the quality of these summaries is essential. - This involves a two-pronged approach: automatic metrics, like #ROUGE or #BLEU, for quantifying overlaps with reference summaries, and human evaluation to assess subtler aspects like readability, style, and informativeness. - Both methods play crucial roles in refining and perfecting transformer-based text summarization techniques. #Transformers #TextSummarization #NLP #EvaluationMethods
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Tharaka Dissanayake
Senior Software Engineer | Tech Educator
ROUGE Scores: ROUGE (Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation) metrics assess the quality of summaries by comparing them to reference summaries, measuring overlap in n-grams, word sequences, and word usage. Human Evaluation: Conducting user studies where human annotators assess the relevance, coherence, and informativeness of generated summaries compared to reference summaries. Diverse Inputs: Evaluating the model's performance on diverse types of texts, such as news articles, scientific papers, and social media posts, to ensure its effectiveness across different domains.
To improve transformers for summarizing text, you can use various techniques and strategies, such as data augmentation, model architecture, hyperparameter tuning, and post-processing. Data augmentation can increase the diversity and quality of the training data, while model architecture affects the capacity and efficiency of the transformer. Hyperparameter tuning can improve the convergence and stability of the transformer, and post-processing can enhance the readability and quality of the summary. Together, these strategies can help reduce overfitting or bias and address common errors or issues of the transformer.
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James Demmitt, MBA
CEO, Purveyor of customer value, innovation, and employee growth. Always a student. | USMC Veteran
To enhance text summarization with transformers, one can implement transfer learning by fine-tuning pre-trained models on domain-specific datasets, thus tailoring the summaries to particular fields like legal or medical documents. Additionally, incorporating attention mechanisms helps the model to focus on salient parts of the text, leading to more accurate summaries. Integrating user feedback loops into the model can further refine its performance over time, adapting to the nuances of summarization preferred by different users or applications.
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Vaibhav Kulshrestha
Lead AI Engineer @ Slytek, Inc. | AI | Robotics | DevOps
- Data augmentation techniques can involve paraphrasing or adding noise to the training data, enhancing the model's ability to generate diverse and accurate summaries. - Optimizing model architecture, such as using more extensive models like T5 or exploring alternative transformer designs, can also boost summarization performance. - Hyperparameter tuning and post-processing steps like removing redundant sentences or ensuring grammatical correctness further refine the summaries. - These improvements address challenges like overfitting, bias, and the generation of coherent summaries. #NLP #Transformers #Summarization #AI #DataAugmentation
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Yashwant (Sai) R.
Director - Machine Learning @ Fidelity Investments | AI Product Leader | Generative AI | High ROI AI
Summarization varies by task, impacting its effectiveness in business contexts. For instance, techniques suitable for email summaries may not align with document summary requirements, due to differing goals and expectations. Automated metrics like BLEU and ROUGE, while useful, often miss subtle nuances in the original text. Human evaluation, although time-intensive and costly, but provides insights into relevance, fluency, and checks for profanity and bias. To optimize transformer driven summaries for specific tasks, a practical approach is refining AI outputs with human input to develop a task-specific training dataset and use it fine tune the LLM. To conclude it’s not AI vs Human but it is AI & Human.
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James Demmitt, MBA
CEO, Purveyor of customer value, innovation, and employee growth. Always a student. | USMC Veteran
Consider the data quality, aiming for high-quality training sets. Tailor summary length to the use case and tune for desired compression. Address biases to ensure fairness. Enhance summaries with explainability and interactivity when needed. Regularly update the model to reflect language changes, and use both automated metrics and human evaluation for assessing quality. Ensure integration with other systems is smooth, and be mindful of legal and ethical implications of summarizing third-party content.
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Pierre Alexandre Schembri
Private and secure AI consulting services | Leverage AI power without disclosing your data
The chain of density prompting technique is very powerful when it comes to produce *dense summaries*. That is information and entity-dense summaries.