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Main Authors: Sie, Mika, Beek, Ruby, Bots, Michiel, Brinkkemper, Sjaak, Gatt, Albert
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09777
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author Sie, Mika
Beek, Ruby
Bots, Michiel
Brinkkemper, Sjaak
Gatt, Albert
author_facet Sie, Mika
Beek, Ruby
Bots, Michiel
Brinkkemper, Sjaak
Gatt, Albert
contents Due to their length and complexity, long regulatory texts are challenging to summarize. To address this, a multi-step extractive-abstractive architecture is proposed to handle lengthy regulatory documents more effectively. In this paper, we show that the effectiveness of a two-step architecture for summarizing long regulatory texts varies significantly depending on the model used. Specifically, the two-step architecture improves the performance of decoder-only models. For abstractive encoder-decoder models with short context lengths, the effectiveness of an extractive step varies, whereas for long-context encoder-decoder models, the extractive step worsens their performance. This research also highlights the challenges of evaluating generated texts, as evidenced by the differing results from human and automated evaluations. Most notably, human evaluations favoured language models pretrained on legal text, while automated metrics rank general-purpose language models higher. The results underscore the importance of selecting the appropriate summarization strategy based on model architecture and context length.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_09777
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Summarizing long regulatory documents with a multi-step pipeline
Sie, Mika
Beek, Ruby
Bots, Michiel
Brinkkemper, Sjaak
Gatt, Albert
Computation and Language
Due to their length and complexity, long regulatory texts are challenging to summarize. To address this, a multi-step extractive-abstractive architecture is proposed to handle lengthy regulatory documents more effectively. In this paper, we show that the effectiveness of a two-step architecture for summarizing long regulatory texts varies significantly depending on the model used. Specifically, the two-step architecture improves the performance of decoder-only models. For abstractive encoder-decoder models with short context lengths, the effectiveness of an extractive step varies, whereas for long-context encoder-decoder models, the extractive step worsens their performance. This research also highlights the challenges of evaluating generated texts, as evidenced by the differing results from human and automated evaluations. Most notably, human evaluations favoured language models pretrained on legal text, while automated metrics rank general-purpose language models higher. The results underscore the importance of selecting the appropriate summarization strategy based on model architecture and context length.
title Summarizing long regulatory documents with a multi-step pipeline
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09777