Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing: Text Summarization Using Attention

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an important field in artificial intelligence (AI) that helps computers understand and interpret human language.
In recent years, the advancement of deep learning has significantly contributed to groundbreaking solutions for many NLP challenges.
One such challenge is Text Summarization. This article will explain the basic concepts of natural language processing using deep learning, as well as the principles and implementation of text summarization using the attention mechanism.

1. Understanding Text Summarization

Text summarization refers to the task of providing a concise summary of the important information in an original document.
This helps solve the problem of information overload and assists readers in quickly grasping the important content.

  • Extractive Summarization: A method that selects and extracts important sentences directly from the original text.
  • Abstractive Summarization: A method that generates new sentences to summarize based on the original text.

1.1 Extractive Summarization

Extractive summarization involves analyzing the content of a document and selecting the most important sentences. This technique typically uses methods such as:

  • TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency): Calculates the importance of words in specific sentences to extract important sentences.
  • Sentence Similarity: Measures the similarity between sentences to determine their importance.

1.2 Abstractive Summarization

Abstractive summarization refers to the process of generating new content based on the original text. This allows for more creative and logical summaries.
Deep learning models, particularly sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) architectures and attention mechanisms, play a crucial role in this process.

2. Deep Learning and NLP

Deep learning is a machine learning technique based on artificial neural networks, optimized for learning patterns through large amounts of data.
The use of deep learning techniques in natural language processing has led to significant innovations in understanding the structure of information and processing sentences.

2.1 RNN and LSTM

Traditional artificial neural networks have limitations in processing sequential data, while Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) are designed to remember past information.
However, RNNs face difficulties in learning long sequences. This issue is addressed by the development of LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory).

  • Long-Term Dependency Problem Solving: LSTM utilizes a mechanism called “cell state” to better remember past information and forget it when unnecessary.
  • Gate Structure: LSTM manages information through input gates, output gates, and forget gates.

2.2 Transformer Model

The recent innovative advancement in NLP is the Transformer model. Unlike RNNs or LSTMs, this model can process entire sentences at once.
The core component of the Transformer is the attention mechanism.

3. Attention Mechanism

The attention mechanism assigns differential weights to each part of the input, selectively emphasizing information.
This method accounts for the fact that information in long sentences can have varying importance, thus aiding in more efficient information processing.

3.1 Principles of Attention

The attention mechanism consists of three main components.

  • Query: An input vector compared for information retrieval.
  • Key: An input vector representing the characteristics of the information being searched.
  • Value: A vector that contains the retrieved information itself.

Based on these three elements, a weighted sum is generated to produce the final output.

3.2 Types of Attention

  • Scaled Dot-Product Attention: Uses the inner product of the query and key to calculate similarity, scaling it to create the final weights.
  • Multi-Head Attention: Performs several attentions in parallel to capture diverse representations.

4. Model Implementation for Text Summarization

Deep learning models for text summarization primarily use the seq2seq architecture.
This model learns the relationship between input sequences and output sequences.

4.1 Data Preparation

The data prepared for text summarization typically consists of pairs of original sentences and their corresponding summaries.
A large dataset is required, and various sources such as news articles and research papers can be utilized.

4.2 Model Architecture

The basic seq2seq structure consists of an encoder and a decoder. The encoder takes the input sentence and transforms it into a high-dimensional vector, while the decoder generates the summary based on this vector.


class Seq2SeqModel(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, encoder, decoder):
        super(Seq2SeqModel, self).__init__()
        self.encoder = encoder
        self.decoder = decoder

    def forward(self, src, trg):
        encoder_output = self.encoder(src)
        decoder_output = self.decoder(trg, encoder_output)
        return decoder_output

4.3 Training Process

To train the model, a loss function is defined, and an optimizer is set up.
A commonly used loss function is the cross-entropy loss, and the Adam optimizer is often employed.


criterion = nn.CrossEntropyLoss()
optimizer = torch.optim.Adam(model.parameters(), lr=0.001)

for epoch in range(num_epochs):
    model.train()
    optimizer.zero_grad()
    outputs = model(src, trg)
    loss = criterion(outputs, trg)
    loss.backward()
    optimizer.step()

5. Performance Evaluation

The performance of the model is commonly evaluated using the BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) score.
The BLEU score is a metric that measures the similarity between the summary generated by the model and the actual summary, with values ranging from 0 to 1.
A score closer to 1 is considered good performance.

5.1 BLEU Score Calculation


from nltk.translate.bleu_score import sentence_bleu

reference = [actual_summary.split()]
candidate = produced_summary.split()

bleu_score = sentence_bleu(reference, candidate)

6. Conclusion

The text summarization technology utilizing deep learning and attention mechanisms holds much potential both theoretically and practically.
With future research and development, it is hoped that this technology will become more widespread and utilized in various fields.
This article has described the process from basic concepts to model implementation, and I hope readers can apply this knowledge to actual projects.