Generation of Highlights from Research Papers Using Pointer-Generator Networks and SciBERT Embeddings

Nowadays many research articles are prefaced with research highlights to summarize the main findings of the paper. Highlights not only help researchers precisely and quickly identify the contributions of a paper, they also enhance the discoverability of the article via search engines. We aim to automatically construct research highlights given certain segments of the research paper. We use a pointer-generator network with coverage mechanism and a contextual embedding layer at the input that encodes the input tokens into SciBERT embeddings. We test our model on a benchmark dataset, CSPubSum and also present MixSub, a new multi-disciplinary corpus of papers for automatic research highlight generation. For both CSPubSum and MixSub, we have observed that the proposed model achieves the best performance compared to related variants and other models proposed in the literature. On the CSPubSum data set, our model achieves the best performance when the input is only the abstract of a paper as opposed to other segments of the paper. It produces ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2 and ROUGE-L F1-scores of 38.26, 14.26 and 35.51, respectively, METEOR F1-score of 32.62, and BERTScore F1 of 86.65 which outperform all other baselines. On the new MixSub data set, where only the abstract is the input, our proposed model (when trained on the whole training corpus without distinguishing between the subject categories) achieves ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2 and ROUGE-L F1-scores of 31.78, 9.76 and 29.3, respectively, METEOR F1-score of 24.00, and BERTScore F1 of 85.25, outperforming other models.