QSG Transformer: Transformer with Query-Attentive Semantic Graph for Query-Focused Summarization

Query-Focused Summarization (QFS) is a task that aims to extract essential information from a long document and organize it into a summary that can answer a query. Recently, Transformer-based summarization models have been widely used in QFS. However, the simple Transformer architecture cannot utilize the relationships between distant words and information from a query directly. In this study, we propose the QSG Transformer, a novel QFS model that leverages structure information on Query-attentive Semantic Graph (QSG) to address these issues. Specifically, in the QSG Transformer, QSG node representation is improved by a proposed query-attentive graph attention network, which spreads the information of the query node into QSG using Personalized PageRank, and it is used to generate a summary that better reflects the information from the relationships of a query and document. The proposed method is evaluated on two QFS datasets, and it achieves superior performances over the state-of-the-art models.