Evaluating the Effects of Embedding with Speaker Identity Information in Dialogue Summarization

AbstractAutomatic dialogue summarization is a task used to succinctly summarize a dialogue transcript while correctly linking the speakers and their speech, which distinguishes this task from a conventional document summarization. To address this issue and reduce the “who said what”-related errors in a summary, we propose embedding the speaker identity information in the input embedding into the dialogue transcript encoder. Unlike the speaker embedding proposed by Gu et al. (2020), our proposal takes into account the informativeness of position embedding. By experimentally comparing several embedding methods, we confirmed that the scores of ROUGE and a human evaluation of the generated summaries were substantially increased by embedding speaker information at the less informative part of the fixed position embedding with sinusoidal functions.