Key point generation as an instrument for generating core statements of a political debate on Twitter

Abstract

Identifying key statements in large volumes of short, user-generated texts is essential for decision-makers to quickly grasp their key content. To address this need, this research introduces a novel abstractive key point generation (KPG) approach applicable to unlabeled text corpora, using an unsupervised approach, a feature not yet seen in existing abstractive KPG methods. The proposed method uniquely combines topic modeling for unsupervised data space segmentation with abstractive summarization techniques to efficiently generate semantically representative key points from text collections. This is further enhanced by hyperparameter tuning to optimize both the topic modeling and abstractive summarization processes. The hyperparameter tuning of the topic modeling aims at making the cluster assignment more deterministic as the probabilistic nature of the process would otherwise lead to high variability in the output. The abstractive summarization process is optimized using a Davies-Bouldin Index specifically adapted to this use case, so that the generated key points more accurately reflect the characteristic properties of this cluster. In addition, our research recommends an automated evaluation that provides a quantitative complement to the traditional qualitative analysis of KPG. This method regards KPG as a specialized form of Multidocument summarization (MDS) and employs both word-based and word-embedding-based metrics for evaluation. These criteria allow for a comprehensive and nuanced analysis of the KPG output. Demonstrated through application to a political debate on Twitter, the versatility of this approach extends to various domains, such as product review analysis and survey evaluation. This research not only paves the way for innovative development in abstractive KPG methods but also sets a benchmark for their evaluation.