Extractive Summarization via ChatGPT for Faithful Summary Generation

Extractive summarization is a crucial task in natural language processing that aims to condense long documents into shorter versions by directly extracting sentences. The recent introduction of ChatGPT has attracted significant interest in the NLP community due to its remarkable performance on a wide range of downstream tasks. However, concerns regarding factuality and faithfulness have hindered its practical applications for summarization systems. This paper first presents a thorough evaluation of ChatGPT's performance on extractive summarization and compares it with traditional fine-tuning methods on various benchmark datasets. Our experimental analysis reveals that ChatGPT's extractive summarization performance is still inferior to existing supervised systems in terms of ROUGE scores. In addition, we explore the effectiveness of in-context learning and chain-of-thought reasoning for enhancing its performance. Furthermore, we find that applying an extract-then-generate pipeline with ChatGPT yields significant performance improvements over abstractive baselines in terms of summary faithfulness. These observations highlight potential directions for enhancing ChatGPT's capabilities for faithful text summarization tasks using two-stage approaches.